Big Guns Launch Utility Salvo

The starting gun has been fired, and IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun are racing toward utility computing by rolling out products designed to give enterprises more efficient computing resources.

Meanwhile, software vendors Computer Associates (CA) and Opsware are joining the scramble by trumpeting new server administration and consolidation tools to ease customers’ transition toward the utility model.

According to Forrester Research, four datacenter innovations — Web services, server provisioning, storage virtualization, and network route optimization — will “recast” datacenter architecture and allow customers to slice IT spending in half.

With that in mind, HP on Tuesday will unveil its Adaptive Enterprise strategy. IBM and Sun last week touted new technologies designed to bolster their utility strategies.

At an event in San Jose, Calif., to mark the one-year anniversary of its merger with Compaq, HP executives will unveil a set of initiatives, including HP software Self-Healing Services and the HP VSE (Virtual Server Environment) solution based on an upgrade to the HP-UX Workload Manager and designed to improve real-time monitoring of resource optimization.

Peter Blackmore, executive vice president of Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP’s enterprise systems group, said the company will offer products “in a more modular way” to help enterprises consolidate datacenter and server resources. HP is planning to introduce a multisystem policy engine that dynamically adjusts system resources based on workload. Also, HP’s Self-Healing Services will use Web services to focus on automatic fault detection, reporting and analysis, and collect troubleshooting data and system information, he noted.

IBM said the offerings it introduced last week address the three requirements for a true on-demand environment: integration, automation, and virtualization. More importantly, the new products “map” these capabilities onto shifting business processes and management needs.

“We are in the process of transitioning our customers over to On Demand environments, and these products give them a way to get started [and] a road map on how to do that,” said Stefan Van Overtveldt, director of WebSphere marketing at IBM in Somers, N.Y.

Among the new offerings is a set of storage virtualization products, which supplies a single and consolidated view to all critical resources on a network, regardless of where the data resides. IBM also rolled out a WebSphere solution that incorporates grid computing technologies to help virtualize application management. Lastly among Big Blue’s new class of automation offerings is Web Server Provisioning, which allows users to either switch or immediately add another server to increase capacity or optimize resources.

Sun last week detailed a systems-metering piece of its utility strategy that would account for low-usage patterns countered by spikes during peak times. Executive said that Sun is approaching utility computing as a way to pool resources of multiple servers, and its N1 technology will enable such pooling.

Although the vision of utility computing is compelling, challenges abound.

A new on-demand model must overcome the cost of change within an IT infrastructure and address issues of heterogeneity to avoid “vendor locking,” said AshfaqueChowdhury, CIO of logistics provider New Breed in High Point, N.C.

“For us as a company today, [utility computing] is premature. I still have questions about the level of complexity our systems have and the level of virtualization they would have to have for something like that to happen,” Chowdhury said. “The key is the software and services cost. If they remain the same, there’s not much of a need to [move] to that.”

Datacenter nirvana, however, is elusive because of a lack of integration, said Frank Gillet, a principal analyst for Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester.

“This is not a rip-and-replace evolution,” Gillet said. “It’s about making what you already have more efficient, more standardized, and cheaper to maintain and operate.”

Gillet said HP has the lead in the utility rush because it has products available for server provisioning and storage virtualization.

While the infrastructure purveyors try to fit the missing pieces into their utility computing puzzles, Opsware and CA are bringing to market tools for administering and consolidating servers.

Opsware on Monday will announce its ASE (Automated Script Execution) capability to simplify how IT administrators make everyday changes to the sever environment. Capable of executing a script across hundreds of servers with intelligence, AES can determine a server’s current configuration and state, said Tim Howes, CTO of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Opsware. It allows customers to take initial steps toward utility computing.

“If you look at what the big guys are promising and what you get today from them in terms of virtualization, they work on a green field environment,” Howes said. “[But] you still need automation. You need to manage ongoing systems through their lives.”

Sanjay Kumar, president and CEO of Islandia, N.Y.-based CA, said IBM and HP have left a gaping software-management hole in their schemes.

Six new Unicenter products unveiled last week are designed to help customers kick-start on-demand computing by taking advantage of CA’s Common Services, which offer users shared business process views, synchronization between business processes and infrastructure, and self-management capabilities.

“Many companies are finding that common resources, such as Windows servers, are seriously underutilized running at 20 percent capacity,” Kumar said. “What is missing is something to drive these resources to higher utilization.”