Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
this collection of full-page image scans in PDF format as TimesMachine where all
11 million articles are included.
The amount of data to be processed was enormous. It was a series of large TIFF
images associated with metadata and article text of the newspapers for 70 years.
That meant terabytes of data that had to be processed and stored. Using Amazon S3
they managed to upload and store the 4TB of data while EC2 provided them with
the necessary CPU power for the concurrent use of hundreds of machines to read
the data, create the PDFs and store them into S3 again, from where the public could
reach it within 36 hours (Gottfrid 2008a, Gottfrid 2008b).
By using the infrastructure provided by Amazon, the NYT was able to offer
their clients a new service not previously available; the experience of a window
into the past from their computers. By using S3 and EC2 from Amazon, the NYT
avoided the purchase of the resources required to process and store such an enor-
mous amount of data. In this way, the NYT succeeded in providing a new and
exciting service at a set-up low cost. This company follows the second business case
as indicated in table 5.1. It rents external computing resources from Amazon, with
Grid being the underline infrastructure, and gains all the aforementioned benefits.
Both the business cases 5 for Amazon and 2 for the NYT are shown in the table 5.7
indicating how these two companies undertake their specific roles. It is worth noting
that the NYT is the user for the fifth business case, while for the second business
case is the provider of a service to other users.
Table 5.7:
Example of business cases 5 and 2: Amazon
Most popular Grid Business
Cases in the market
The Grid benefit (value-
proposition or added-value)
Main actors involved
5. Company acts as a computing
resources provider:
Amazon
For the user: Resources
provided on demand.
Performance differentiation,
cost efficiency, service differ-
entiation
For the company: revenue
generation and reduced costs
of offering such a service
through virtualisation
The resource provider:
Amazon
The users that buy
resources on demand:
The
Times New York
2. Company rents external
computing resources through
the internet with Grid being the
underlying infrastructure on the
provider's side:
The
Times New
York
For the company:
Performance differentiation,
cost efficiency, service differ-
entiation
The company:
The
Times New York
Given the success of companies renting external computing resources from large
infrastructure providers, this section presents another example of these two busi-
ness cases. Sun is an American vendor of computers, computer components,
computer software, and information-technology services that now provides
computing resources to its customers. The company was recently involved in Grid
