An article on TechWorld a couple of days ago quoted Richard Warley, Savvis’ European MD, reiterating the well worn mantra that utility computing is “about being more flexible, and offering better value by arbitraging the unused computing cycles.” I’ll admit that when I first started thinking about utility computing the easily quantifiable goal of increasing CPU utilization was what came to my mind as well. However, I was wrong.

In early 2000 I was fortunate enough to have several customers buying networking gear from me that were early adopters of VMware for server consolidation. While they did save somewhat on hardware costs, none of them made the move to save money. In fact, most of them figured the savings were nill. Instead, security, backup and control were the reasons most often cited. Savings weren’t a driver because servers were already cheap, but managing the software that runs on them is costly. At the time server consolidation did nothing to help reduce the manpower associated with server management. VMware learned from their customers and over the last few years has geared much of the effort around reducing the time spent managing each image. For instance, making virtual machine images reusable so you can quickly restore a server by booting the VM images.

What I’m trying to get accross is that as we move toward utility computing, merely stuffing racks of servers into data centers is equivalent to server consolidation on a larger scale. The savings, if there are any, are incremental.

To realy make utility computing revolutionary requires moving beyond utilization as a metric. We need to deal with larger entities than server images. We need to move entire distributed applications onto the service, so we can minimize the manpower involved in deploying, managing and scaling applications. This is what 3tera has been working on for the past eighteen months.