“Back in the 1980s, the folks at Digital Equipment had a problem. While their VAX systems were selling like hotcakes, the systems still couldn’t deliver the kind of scale found on mainframes. Digital, which had no plans to build big iron, set out to find a way to use existing equipment to increase capacity–a search that led to the development of the VAX cluster and the concept of horizontal scaling.” Read the editorial at ZDNews.
Why Wait for Utility Computing?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
“Utilitily computing” rather humorous. It is the same idea, aka, “time sharing” but witb a new name. Most people I am sure remember back in the pre-PC era when people would have a dumb terminal, 9600bps modem and used to buy time on a mainframe.
This is the same technology, re-wraped but now with a completely new buzz word.
the only diffrence now is that with highly scaled systems with hundreds of Proccesors, new Memory managment techniques, and logical hardware partitioning, you can be using the system at the same time as some one eles, not almost at the same time as you do with time sharing.
Isn’t IBM the same kind of “vertically integrated” company that Digital was in the 80s? They have fab plants, they build systems (including big iron), they can control the OS (they’ve written plenty), and they have their own backend (db2), middle-tier (websphere), and access to apache sources for a front end. So the author’s assumption that IBM will have to get “thousands of possible combinations” to work seems ludicrous–they can just push their own components as an integrated solution.
Right?
KOMPRESSOR