VideoMobil didn't need to buy anything up front; it just had to agree on forecasted levels of processing power, storage, and connectivity bandwidth. Should the travel site — which expected spikes in demand during the summer — require more, it would be provisioned. For a business with uneven demand patterns, pay-as-you-go made a lot more sense than a traditional fixed-price agreement. Mobil signed on.
Now, nearly two years later, Mercurio is pleased with the arrangement. For one thing, the site (www.mobiltravelguide.com) was up and running within two months. And he estimates that Mobil has saved 25 to 30 percent annually on a discounted cash-flow basis. Much of the savings are in up-front capital costs and lower charges for months like February, when few drivers are planning leisurely cross-country treks. —N.A.
You Can Always Tell a Harvard CIO...
Both IBM and Hewlett-Packard tried to convince John Halamka M.D. of the merits of utility computing. Halamka, who is CIO of Harvard Medical School, was impressed. So impressed, in fact, that he decided Harvard would adopt a utility model — but without help from the two giant vendors.
"Harvard was big enough so that we felt we could be our own vendor, building an internal utility-computing service and making it available to the faculty. This is such new technology that we wanted to get in on the ground level and do it on our own," says Halamka.
Harvard Medical's shared research cluster allows researchers to access a common resource of Linux-based computing horsepower and storage, as well as a library of biocomputing applications. The arrangement depends in part on clustering software from Platform Computing, which bills itself as a leader in grid computing — yet another near-synonym for utility computing, at least as manifested in the sharing of internal computing power. At Harvard, the cluster replaces unlinked departmental servers, enabling researchers to tap into idle capacity.
By allowing researchers to access spare CPU cycles as needed, Harvard hopes to speed publication of research results, an unbending yardstick of academic prestige. The project cost $250,000 to implement, according to Halamka, and will bring significant savings, in part by allowing Harvard to consolidate servers and reduce space requirements, not to mention trim staff. In all, the project should save $500,000 in acquisition costs and $100,000 in annual operating expenses. —N.A.
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