Opinion: Scalability, manageability and compatibility improvements address rising need for peak-load response.
Its good news when distributed computing platforms let you allocate
resources
as
easily as a teenager manages the playlist on an iPod. Its great
news when that distributed solution gets important improvements to
scalability,
manageability and compatibility with heterogeneous development
environments. Thats what were seeing on April 10 from Gigaspaces with
its
release
of its Version 5 infrastructure product line, which commands my
attention as one of the best available demonstrations of the ideas in
JavaSpaces—and the underlying "tuple space" concepts that are often associated
with
Yales
Linda project but have also
evolved beyond
that work.
It seems as if theres no such thing as too much information on the
system virtualization options available to eWEEK readers, and were
trying to meet that demand with coverage from our teams in both
News and
Labs.
It seems to me that the demand for virtualization news is driven by the
trend toward enterprise IT workloads with
rising
peak-to-average ratios. Putting more of an enterprise portfolio of
data and supply-chain processing into externally facing systems creates
a growing need for systems to respond on other peoples schedules,
moving ever farther away from anything resembling optimal batch
scheduling of periodic tasks. Conventional provisioning for peak loads
becomes ever more uneconomic as those peaks become a higher multiple of
the average.
Theres a real cost to the enterprise in offering immediate response
to all comers. Users react badly to explicit multitier pricing schemes
that make it more expensive for them to get instant gratification, but
theres no reason why enterprises cant subtly steer outside users
toward less costly off-peak processing —by offering premium content,
for example, in response to e-mailed requests thats not available by
phone or by online on-demand channels.
We compare "utility computing" to the
electric grid, or use terms
like "Webtone" to compare future net-based offerings to the telephone
grid, but we do well to remember that those other models of
transparency fail badly under peak loads. Try to get full voltage in
the middle of summer when air conditioning workloads force "brownouts";
try to get a
dial tone in the first five minutes after a power outage turns off the lights.
Peak loads are expensive, no matter how transparent a virtualization
technology may become, and its a good idea to look at ways of leveling
those peaks even as we also seek to minimize their costs.
Tell me what youre finding a peak experience at
peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com.
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