Chapter 4. The Next Technology Paradigm: Computing as a Utility
If you can make [computing] a utility, that means your network is on all the time…and you'll use special services only when you need them. If you do one day's work of supercomputing a month, you don't need to own it.
—Joel Birnbaum, former CTO, Hewlett-Packard Company
In This Chapter:
Joel Birnbaum, who was HP's chief technology officer at the time, made a very telling remark when he said that Itanium does for computing what the World Wide Web did for data. That statement could be taken to mean many things to different people, but for our purposes it means two important things: first, that computing power can be easily shared among dispersed and disparate user communities in a single organization, and second, that you can treat computing power as you would gas or electric utilities—you will be allowed to pay for only what you need to use and not tie up capital in paying for a shortage or excess of what you need.
The Itanium-based system makes the perfect platform for this “utility” computing for three reasons.
The incredible degree of vendor support for the architecture indicates that all major applications will be written to run on it over the next 5 years.
The move to utility computing may be completely enabled by Itanium due to its ability to remove incompatibility issues and provide support that is completely transparent to end users and programmers alike.