How to: How to get to utility computing

In football, an audible is a quarterback's opportunity to change his strategy after seeing the defense line up on the field. A slew of vendors - advocates of so-called utility computing - are promising to give IT executives the tools to likewise deploy IT resources on the fly as business conditions change.

In theory, utility computing gives managers greater utilization of data-center resources at lower operating costs. At their disposal will be flexible computing, storage and network capacity that can react automatically to changes in business priorities. The data center of the future also will have self-configuring, self-monitoring and self-healing features so managers can reduce today's manual configuration and troubleshooting chores, advocates say.

The allure of utility computing is easy to see, but there's no clear road map. Getting there requires an approach that encompasses network gear, servers, software, services and IT governance. It also requires balancing the maintenance of existing IT resources with strategic new investments.

Having a clear picture of what already has been deployed is crucial before companies start to roll out new, intelligent devices. This might sound obvious, but experts say it's not always done.

Gartner analyst John Phelps says many companies don't know where all their servers are located, who controls and owns them, and the main functions and applications running on them.

Companies also don't have a clear picture of how their IT assets relate to each other. For example, one e-business transaction might depend on data culled from several applications running on different platforms in multiple locations. Figuring out these sorts of dependencies is a prerequisite of higher level computing, analysts say.

"Utility computing does not exist in a vacuum," says Jasmine Noel, principal with JNoel Associates. "The only way to do it is to first understand the relationships between hardware and software resources delivering a particular business service. Inventory discovery and relationship mapping are the keys to starting."

While companies focus on the fundamentals, vendors are working to create intelligent devices, management tools and services for utility consumption. The field is crowded, weighted by HP, IBM and Sun. IBM uses "on-demand" to describe its initiative. HP has its Utility Data Center lineup and Sun has its N1 data-center architecture.

Several software vendors have a stake in utility computing, including management software makers such as BMC Software and Computer Associates and storage management software maker Veritas Software.

There's plenty of work to do. Analysts say it will be a long time before routers can reconfigure themselves, servers can provision themselves and applications can dedicate more resources to themselves on the fly without human intervention. Building a true utility computing infrastructure is at least a seven- to 10-year effort, analysts say.

That doesn't mean companies should shelve their plans. There are plenty of opportunities to begin consolidating, standardizing and automating data-center resources today - and begin reaping the rewards of improved system management and reduced complexity.

Management counts

Management is the cornerstone of utility computing. Management software in the new data center proposes to do more than monitor devices; it will store and enforce policies, discover devices, track changes, meter usage and ultimately take action when performance degrades.

The challenge will be capturing end-to-end systems data and consolidating it into something manageable, says George Hamilton, a senior analyst with The Yankee Group. "IT managers need to focus on getting all the data they capture from instrumentation and testing, and consolidate it in one place so they can more effectively manage," he says.

But it won't be easy. Today, most companies use multiple management systems to collect performance and availability data, identify potential failures, and provision devices, applications and end users. To be useful in an adaptive environment, management systems must evolve beyond islands of expertise.

"It's a challenge to get multiple systems optimized and running and tied together. Anybody looking at utility computing should try to find a vendor that has a comprehensive solution that can help people tie the pieces together," says Bob Ackerly, president of Smith and Associates. The Houston semiconductor company uses Vieo's Adaptive Application Infrastructure Management (AAIM) appliance to monitor about 40 servers in its data center.

Some vendors are working to make products more cooperative. For example, BMC recently partnered with security vendor Symantec and storage leader EMC to share management data across systems. Similarly, Cisco and IBM recently signed a deal in which the two will develop a common way to detect, log and resolve system problems.

Vendors also are developing management tools that not only watch devices but also monitor distinct business functions. Concord Communications, Mercury Interactive and Micromuse have begun to develop their software tools to track the success and failure of business processes.

Following the path of a business process means crossing Web and application servers, databases, storage devices and the routers that direct traffic. To adequately track the path, the software first must find relationships between data-center components; map those relationships into a logical topology; and configure the devices to report on how they perform, change and respond to application requests, Noel says. "It can be a mess unless some smart operations planning is done upfront."