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Virtualisation has been around for quite some time, but it's only within the past 2 years that the technology has really started to take off and gain in popularity. Likewise, utility computing is only now starting to get the notice that it believes it's due. Commercial utility computing solutions based on virtualisation such as 3Tera's AppLogic and Amazon's EC2 are starting to get more attention.

To help try and understand the utility computing market better, I spoke to 3Tera's Bert Armijo, senior vice president of sales, marketing and product management, and Peter Nickolov, president and CTO.

Q: Virtualisation is the latest popular buzzword in the technology industry and every media outlet is talking about it in some form or fashion. Can you tell us, why aren't more people talking about Utility Computing? A: New technologies, developments that aren't linear extensions of existing systems, always take time to catch on. Virtualisation came out in 1999, but it wasn't until five years later, in 2004, that it became a hot topic. Utility computing really started just last year with the introduction of 3tera's AppLogic in February 2006, and six months later Amazon launched EC2.

Now that we have users who have been in production for more than a year and new releases of code are coming out, we're seeing more and more interest and coverage.

Q: Do you believe that utility computing is the next step for people once they get into virtualisation? Is the technology inevitable? A: There are a lot people adopting AppLogic that have never used virtualisation, so I don't see it as a required stepping stone for utility computing. The value propositions are different.

Utility computing is a business enabler. Most Web 2.0 users start using AppLogic because they want to be sure they can scale when they get demand. SaaS vendors want to be able to replicate applications for users at will. Enterprise users are interested in making infrastructure become responsive to business requirements. Virtualisation, on the other hand, is most often used for server consolidation. The adoption has been driven by cost savings, and that's clearly reflected in the coverage they've gotten.

Is utility computing inevitable? I'm biased, of course, but I believe so. Building data centres, racking servers and plugging network cables in no longer adds value to most businesses. We've proven that not only can you tap readily available computing resources as easily as plugging in a toaster, but that the result is more resilient and flexible. Technology transitions don't happen over night, though, so we're working with many customers who want to build their own utility as well.

Q: Where do you see server virtualisation technology lacking at the moment? Are there any missing features? A: Virtualisation isn't lacking, it was simply built for a different purpose. Virtualisation is designed to carve a resource into smaller pieces for efficient usage. It was also, as it turns out, a needed technological stepping stone to utility computing.

Utility computing is really about aggregating resources and making them consumable in a new way. That's why when folks simply try to apply virtualisation to utility computing the lack of certain services becomes acute resulting in compromised storage and networking features. We've written about that in a previous article "The 7 services virtualisation lacks for utility computing."

As an example of the difference in scope between virtualisation and utility computing, consider an actual debugging example. We have a customer running a search engine on AppLogic who was troubleshooting lost page requests. About 1 out of 1,000 requests was being dropped. After an hour on WebEx with our engineers it became clear it'd be easier if we could run our own tests. The customer simply exported a copy of the app to us and two hours later we had our own running copy. Yes, I really mean they copied and exported an entire search engine; load balancers, firewalls, web servers, data bases and more. And when we got it all we had to do was hit run. That type of power in manipulating a huge application is what I mean by utility computing is an enabler.

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