As of late winter, an unnamed East Coast financial institution, a major beverage company in Asia and a few other customers in North America were testing Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Utility Data Center.
Introduced by HP last fall, UDC represents an emerging vision for eliminating physical racking, wiring and configuring of servers, storage, bandwidth and other data center resources for each new customer or customer expansion. Instead, data center operators may build a single, shared physical infrastructure and then allocate capacity at a 'virtual' level for each expansion via a drag-and-drop management system.
"With UDC, we place all computer, storage and networking resources into a shared pool, so you can redirect resources at any time, vs. each resource being dedicated permanently to a specific job," says Nick van der Zweep, director of marketing for HP's always-on infrastructure solutions division. "We've worked with DreamWorks [SKG film studios] to model and plan super-scaling for movies like Shrek, for which you might need 100 Linux servers for 10 days, and then release that capacity back into the data center for the next project."
Further, HP has begun to offer "utility pricing" for its data center hardware products. With mid- to large-scale HP servers, a customer can buy a box with multiple CPUs and only pay for each CPU as it's brought online, in effect offering upfront financing to operators.
"In addition to that, we have pay per use, so that the range might be $5,000 one month and $11,000 the next month," van der Zweep says. In HP's giant SuperDome server, he adds, "the graphical interface allows you to turn on and off combinations of 64 CPUs, even by day-part, and then if the average is 48 CPUs, that's the price you pay that day."
Through combinations of server consolidation, blade server rack architecture, partitioning of multiple operating systems on a single box, decoupling of storage from server hardware into storage area networks (SANs) and other techniques, Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp., EMC Corp., IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and other server and storage vendors say they are also tilting their product development toward the utility model.
"What keeps service providers up at night is being able to deliver 24-by-seven and being able to scale," says Chris Kruell, enterprise system group marketing manager for Sun, whose Dynamic System Domain approach allows on-the-fly reallocation of hardware resources to any application based on workload triggers. "We're doing more server consolidation briefings in recent months because more people are looking at server sprawl, which hinders scale."
Major data center operators are applauding the utility trend for its potential to take screwdrivers, wrenches, and box-by-box management out of the operations cost equation, while also cutting implementation times from weeks to days or even hours.
However, they say, spigot-like resource allocation still runs against the preponderance of demand for secure, dedicated hardware. Also the multi-vendor management systems available so far fall short of the flexibility and specificity afforded by management systems designed to run each distinct box.
"Right now, most customers still like to be on their own machine with their dedicated policies and systems for security reasons," says Phil Simmonds, senior director of product marketing for Conxion Corp., which has hosted major upgrade download sites for Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. and operates managed hosting centers in the United States. and United Kingdom. "Computer processing costs have come down, so it's not much more expensive to have dedicated equipment as it is difficult to figure out all the configuration challenges of shared pools."
Executives for leading managed hosters Conxion, Genuity and WorldCom Inc. say they also face the same conundrum suffered in applying 'umbrella' management systems across multiple categories of network devices. "A lot of vendors are aiming at rapid storage activation, for example, but today Sun management is really good at Sun boxes, EMC is really good at EMC boxes," says Paul Keresy, director of product management, storage and edge services for Genuity Inc. "It's more a question of what the multiple vendor management systems fail to do."
Nevertheless, those in charge of building and managing data centers believe the utility approach does hold promise, especially for serving a growing niche of small and medium enterprise (SME) customers who like the price points made possible by pre-built, repeatable solutions. Even at the high end, they say, shared pools of the most expensive resources -- especially storage and power -- are already practical and have paved the way for unprecedented implementation time guarantees.
HP UTILITY DATA CENTER
The HP Utility Data Center is a fully integrated software and hardware solution that enables virtual provisioning of application environments to optimize asset utilization and reduce administrative staff.
1. WIRE ONCE
All components are wired to support virtual allocation of resources for the entire system.
2. RESOURCE VIRTUALIZATION
All network storage and server components are wired once and can be allocated and reallocated many times without having to rewire any physical components.
3. UTILITY CONTROLLER
Simpler user interface allows administrators to architect new systems and activate the using available resources
