Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 6.3:
Utility computing value network
The main market players are:
• The
Grid resource provider
is responsible for the provision of the resources on
which the application or the virtual machines run. Super computing centres with
big computing farms are examples of Grid resource providers.
• The
software/service provider
offers a range of services (computing, storage,
security, etc.) for the end users to build, deploy, and run their applications
or virtual machines, and one of its core competencies is the management of
a massive data centre. The service provider deals with capacity planning to
support elastic workloads and track consumption to determine the costs to be
charged. It's also usual that these services are provided by the Grid Resources
provider, although there may be a gap for third party services.
• The
Grid software provider
supplies the middleware required to run on top of the
resources in the Grid. In most cases, all the big market players have built their
own Grid infrastructure and developed the middleware internally.
Often these three roles are merged, and one provider takes on all the three aforemen-
tioned roles, and builds the whole solution.
Compared to the internal Grid deployment, the role of the end user changes
remarkably in the utility computing scenario. While in the first scenario, the Grid
adoption may require considerable internal changes, in practice, the latter one just
means outsourcing certain IT activities. This outsourcing may range from long term
contracts where the end-user outsources all or part of the IT activities to intermittent
customers who buy capacity only as and when needed.
Most important flows between the end user and service providers are the serv-
ices and payments. The end user either pays a fixed fee (e.g. a subscription) or a
variable fee for a measured use of a service. A fixed fee normally includes limited
computing cycles, traffic, storage and other features such as accounts, and a variable
charge for additional consumption of resources. The use based payment is variable,
and the amount depends on the consumption of resources.
