The anatomy of utility IT
- Article 1 of 1
- The fifth utility, April 2002
Is it really possible to create a 'worry-free' system that offers as much power as needed on demand?
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The difficulty for server administrators lies in deciding which resources should be allocated to which partitions. In response, most suppliers are aiming to introduce some form of 'dynamic partitioning', letting systems decide how to allocate resources to each partition on the fly. Sun product marketing manager Mark Lewis proudly claims that Sun's top-end Fire servers are the only ones capable of dynamic hardware partitioning, although software partitioning will only be available once the Solaris 9 operating system comes out. IBM's current systems require operating system restarts to achieve a change of partitioning, but through a technology deal with virtualisation specialist VMWare can offer 20 dynamic software partitions even on its eSeries mid-range servers. However, its zSeries mainframe can mimic up to 10,000 Linux servers.
Although a top-down utility computing approach produces a more seamless utility computing environment by virtue of there being relatively few physical servers to manage – just virtual servers – it is an expensive option for most companies. A Sun Fire 15K costs over $1 million, the equivalent price of several dozens of mid-range and low-end servers from HP or Dell. Equally important is that existing servers can be incorporated into a bottom-up utility approach. Either way, the technology involved in utility computing is neither simple nor inexpensive.
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