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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
HP UDC TO PAVE THE WAY FOR
COMMODITY COMPUTING
Hewlitt-Packard is currently developing a "Utility Data Centre" (UDC) in
Bristol, England with racks of servers, switches and firewalls in order to
harness the power of processing and storage as a utility.
Utility Computing is a process in which businesses would use power only as
they needed it -- much like electricity or water. When more computing power is
needed, more hardware is turned on.
In order to induce such an operation, however, a UDC would need a wire-once
fabric to connect all servers, a modular design, server virtualization,
storage virtualization, fall-over replication, and be managed as a
service.
Web services, utility computing, .NET, CPU harvesting and distributed
computing are just a few of the technologies that fall under the Grid
computing umbrella. Gt04 -- a premiere enterprise Grid computing conference
targeting industrial and commercial users -- will gather experts, and outline
strategies and road maps for Grid deployment. For more information, visit
www.gt04.com.
Grid computing is here!
The idea has been around for years, but now researchers are confident that
it
can become a reality. Grid computing, pay-as-you-go hardware and on-demand
computing make up utility computing's sub sectors, according to HP
researchers.
HP is also working on bringing another concept to fruition. It involves
computing power moving to a network of private UDCs off-site and competing for
customers. Though it wouldn't happen for another 10 or 20 years, businesses
could pay only for the servers and storage they use and add more power should
the need arise. In this way, SMEs would merely pay for what is used instead of
running a data center that cannot fully utilize its capacity.
Such advancements could lead to a world where computing power is sold by
brokers to buyers at the lowest price, while also taking into account other
aspects of a UDC such as service level agreements (SLAs) and unique
capabilities.
HP has constructed several UDCs at selected sites and has pilot customers
like
422 South, which uses the UDC to animate short productions in a much quicker
manner.
Though many researchers see computing power as a commodity, they
acknowledge
that enterprises will still need to maintain their own data centers that can
also function as a utility, allowing them to shift vast IT resources on the
fly to cope with demand in different areas of the business. Enhanced physical
consolidation of data centers, smaller IT support staff, quick upgrades on
live systems, and more sophisticated and efficient cooling systems in the data
centers are other benefits of the UDC.
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