The promise of utility computing (page 1 of 2)

At its best, utility computing should provide IT services from a computing grid, similar in concept to an electric grid, from which companies can purchase just the amount of resources needed, and only for the time they need it.

The utility computing model is based on a shift away from technology for technology's sake, and a shift toward aligning technology with business requirements. This shift is already evident in many IT departments today, where there is a greater level of visibility into the costs of various IT operations. With accountability and charge-back capabilities, business practices and pricing models will evolve for the mutual benefit of both the IT department providing the service, and the business units using the service.

This article explores utility computing through software in three key areas: availability, performance, and automation.

Preventing data loss and downtime

Integral to any IT utility is the availability of data and applications; after all, an organization is dependent upon these elements in order to function. To ensure the highest levels of IT availability, an organization requires a range of software solutions that support a wide spectrum of operating systems, applications, databases, and hardware platforms and devices to fully protect a heterogeneous IT environments. High availability also means having an effective disaster recovery solution in place. These solutions can range from simple vaulting of backup tapes to full site failover using replication and clustering technology.

Gartner Inc. research shows that fewer than 30 percent of Fortune 2000 companies have invested in a full business continuance plan. The reason for this oversight may simply be that the technical challenges seem too daunting.

The first step in a disaster recovery plan is to build a data center that can continue operations in the face of hardware failure, power outages, or other common IT challenges. To accomplish this, hardware, data, and applications must be redundant, highly available, scalable, and secure. Clustering is one popular tactic for building resiliency into a data center.

The next step is to build another resilient data center at a separate location. True resiliency is achieved by ensuring that business-critical information resides in more than one place, and that the two locations are not susceptible to the same disaster.

Keeping performance levels high

Although availability is at the foundation of any utility computing strategy, it doesn't guarantee a usable system. The system can be available, but run very slowly. Application users will not tolerate painfully slow systems because it impacts their productivity. Fortunately, solutions exist today that allow IT departments to detect, diagnose, and correct performance problems before end users notice.

Today's performance solutions provide enterprises with:

• Optimized end-user response time

• Improved overall quality of service

• Automated discovery of performance degradation and rapid resolution

Because business applications are multi-tiered -- database servers, application servers, Web servers, networks, and clients -- application performance must take into account the complete environment. How well applications perform depends on how well those infrastructure components work together. Maintaining a consistently high performance requires an application performance management (APM) system that tracks the information flow across those tiers.