Experts take hard look at utility model

Now that IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems have sketched their visions for on-demand and utility computing, analysts and users are taking a hard look at the real-world value of such initiatives.

What they are finding is that the competing plans do in fact have aspects in common: the amount of work each company needs to undertake to materialize its vision and the lack of an adequately defined road map as to when the vital pieces of each plan will be delivered.

“There is a certain amorphousness – along with inherent generalities – in the visions being presented here. And what makes it difficult are the different approaches being taken and the level of ambition among the three [inititiatives],” said Gordon Haff, senior analyst at Illuminata, a market-research company in Nashua, N.H.

Looking at the breadth of software, hardware, and services necessary to deliver an on-demand solution, some industry observers are placing IBM’s vision ahead of its those of its archrivals, whereas others are taking a wait-and-see approach.

In terms of systems management, however, most analysts agree that IBM Tivoli and HP OpenView offer the most sophisticated approach and that both IBM and HP have at least given users some idea as to how those products will evolve to accommodate this new realm of computing.

“IBM and HP are on par with each other on systems management, although HP has a slight edge because of the provisioning built into the Utility Data Center,” said Frank Gillet, senior analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester. “But [both companies] present users with the problem of doing integration of separate provisioning solutions across Unix and Intel platforms. They both need a better integration story there.”

Through its acquisition of Think Dynamics last week, IBM added a tangible asset to its largely intangible On Demand initiative: Think Dynamics’ line of automated systems-management products, which provide so-called “orchestrated provisioning.” The acquisition came on the heels of details announced by HP about its Adaptive Enterprise strategy two weeks ago.

While HP and IBM square off with each other on all fronts, some observers see Sun, with its N1 initiative, competing primarily in the Unix fray, although that area does represent a lavish opportunity.

“Sun talks about heterogeneity, but really you are mostly talking about Sun-based environments and are talking largely about infrastructure. With someone like IBM, it is more about a bigger, global vision backed by a very large services organization,” Haff said.

On the hardware front, IBM has been aggressively pulling systems – from mainframes to Intel-based servers  – under its On Demand umbrella. During the past two weeks, for example, IBM unveiled its most powerful mainframe to date – the z990, code-named T-Rex – and the Unix-based p690 server. The company has been heavily promoting the new systems’ on-demand and virtualization features and has showcased their capabilities of handling on/off capacity and of drawing on added processors and memory – even from remote servers – to better handle unexpected spikes in demand.

Meanwhile HP introduced its iCOD (Capacity on Demand) and Pay Per Use solutions, which the company said are included with 40 percent of all currently shipping HP Superdome servers. The company also extended its iCOD and temporary programs to include standby capacity on demand, including CPU, memory, and cell board.

Banking on its networking experience, Sun claims its software and hardware come ready for the utility-services model, and the company is looking to N1 to offer utility attributes such as virtualization and capacity on demand.

According to many analysts, services will play an important role in the utility-computing arena. With its $36 billion Global Services unit having connections to every product that is part of its On Demand initiative, IBM naturally has declared that organization as the glue that will help corporate users integrate the myriad parts constituting an enterprise-class solution.

When HP detailed its Adaptive Enterprise two weeks ago, company executives touted the company’s services business, particularly its high-level business-process capabilities.

According to its Web site, Sun offers utility services in Europe and the Asia Pacific region and plans to make those services available in the United States later this year. Those services include pay-for-use pricing, service-oriented infrastructure, and multisource service delivery, including self management, managed services, and partnered outsourcing.

One user said that software – as opposed to hardware and services – will be the key to utility computing at his company.

“Over the long term, it will be all about systems management for us. Things like virtualization, provisioning, and management really can’t be separated from each other. They are all a part of tying the whole thing together,” said Ralph Henderson, vice president of operations at a large transportation company in Houston. “What we see now are larger companies that are moving from a watching-over-things-until-they-break approach to more of a policy-based, autonomous-computing infrastructure.”

Analysts believe that all three companies must figure out how to tie their on-demand solutions across the breadth of their own server offerings and those of their competitors.

“We would rate IBM at a C+ because of the huge amount of work remaining to fill out that vision, and IBM’s rivals anywhere from a C- to an F,” Tony Baer, principal at New York-based onStrategies, said in reference to a report card the company recently issued.