"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

-- Charles Dudley Warner, 19th century American essayist and novelist

In Hong Kong's steamy, typhoon-teeming summers, everyone talks about the weather-and lately, the air pollution index. But, as Warner noted, no one does anything about it (although HKSAR Chief Executive Donald Tsang is at least talking about our decaying air quality).

And the same could be said about utility computing: everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.

Defining the term

Before every vendor using the term "utility computing" (UC) objects, let's define the term. In the strictest sense of "utility," computing power should be bought and sold like electricity, gas, or water-available 24/7, pay-as-you-use.

The problem of course is that computing is not nearly as simple as conventional utilities. The most complex of these is electricity, which is standardized on alternating current (although frequencies and voltages vary globally, not to mention guaranteed delivery or quality-of-signal).

How complex is UC? "Utility computing is the pipe dream of being able to charge for compute power like utilities charge for water and electricity," said Bill Roth, VP of BEA's workshop business unit. "While this is appealing from a business perspective, we are no closer to this from a technology perspective than we are to putting someone on Mars."

Why? "Computing requires a vast amount of context, as opposed to the context of volts, amps and watts for electricity," said Roth. In a July 2005 survey, research firm IDC added: "Customer perspectives of utility computing extend beyond that of what the IT world is presenting to traditional types of utility-like services (such as processing services) as well as to online providers that customers are beginning to view as potential utility providers."

Vendor perspective

But UC has been a buzzword for years, and vendors have inevitably applied the term to products and/or services they offer which resemble a utility model. And often these applications are useful and good value. However, it is sometimes more accurate to refer to them as "grid computing," which is not UC.

What is grid computing? "Grid computing is the well established practice of farming out *certain* kinds of work to a group of computing resources which may be chosen on the basis of excess capacity," said Roth. "This in and of itself is nothing new-graduate students have been doing this kind of work since the mid-80s. In short, comparing grid to utility computing is like comparing apples to hand grenades: they're both small and green but are used to completely different effect."

The most heavily publicized initiative to date is the Sun Grid Compute Utility from Sun Microsystems. "Sun Grid provides easy and affordable access to an enormous computing resource for the predictable and all-inclusive price of (US)$1/CPU-hr," said Sun on their dedicated Sun Grid website: http://www.network.com/. There's no need to mention the currency involved, as the service from US-based Sun is "currently available exclusively to users located within the United States...Please note: both the user

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