Utility computing: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 03:46, 14 July 2006

Revision as of 03:47, 14 July 2006

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== History ==

Utility computing is not a new concept but has a very long history. It was first described by John McCarthy at MIT Centennial in 1961. He said, "If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility... The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry."

IBM conducted this kind of business offering computing power and database storage to big banks from its world wide data centers. As Intel increased the desktop power, the computer architecture has gone through terminal/mainframe, client/server, brower/middleware. Recently, it was re-initiated by Sun offering the [[Sun Grid]] service to consumers in 2000. HP introduced the Utility Data Center in 2001. Since 2000 many important computing companies have entered the market, but there have also been smaller organizations that have used utility computing. Some of these organizations use utility computing to help offset the cost of their own hardware, others use it to share the cost of resources within organizations. In December 2005, [[Alexa]] launched Alexa Web Search Platform, a Web search building tool for which the underlying power is utility computing. Alexa charges users for storage, utilization, etc. There is space in the market for other niche applications powered by utility computing.