David Chernicoff

While grid computing vendors Sun and IBM are taking the reins of the utility computing market, the competition is collaborating to provide proof-of-concept projects to improve and showcase their services and offerings. This week brought us the announcement of Project MegaGrid, a collaborative effort between Dell, EMC, Intel and Oracle that is focused on developing […]

Making use of unused CPU cycles on your client computers isnt a new idea. Going back into the 1980s, there was network database software that let you install a small piece of agent software on your client computers that, after normal business hours, would allow the database server to distribute its indexing load to any […]

One of the current buzzwords of the server world is “consolidation.” Depending on who you talk to, this means anything from using really big servers running virtualization software (such as VMware) pretending to be lots of smaller servers, to lots of smaller servers packed into small spaces (blade servers, et al.) that can be used […]

Back in the early days of business computing, implementing computing technology meant building a relationship with a single vendor. Everyone had their own proprietary architectures, and when you selected a vendor, you were entering into the technology equivalent of marriage. The vendor moved into your business and provided you with all of the computing services […]

One name that doesnt come up too often when you are talking about grid or utility computing is Microsoft. Theyve staked some ground in the high-end space with their High Performance Computing initiative, but they arent really on the same playing field yet with the likes of Sun, IBM, or even HP, Veritas or Red […]

Following up on its recent announcement of Sun N1 Grid Computing Utility Pay-Per-Use Cycles, Sun Microsystems has announced its next level of grid computing services, targeted at higher-end customers. More importantly, the announced Sun Utility Computing for High-End Grid, while offered through Sun, is actually being provided by Sun partners. Sun has announced that the […]

The Information Technology Solution Providers Alliance on Tuesday announced its predictions for the top technology trends that will have the greatest impact on the SMB (small to midsized business) space, helping to keep those businesses competitive and successful in the larger business world. Most of the trends ITSPA predicted are pretty much what youd expect: […]

Back, somewhere before the dawn of time, when I first got involved with computers, computing resources were incredibly expensive. On the big iron machines that I first encountered, the cost of use was so high that users were allotted and billed for CPU seconds. And the cost per second could be quite significant. Of course, […]

Utility computing is still one of those terms that have yet to be definitively defined. Ask a room full of IT professionals what it means to them, and I guarantee youll get at least three or four significantly different responses, ranging from a technique to build high-speed computational clusters with low-cost hardware to an easy […]

The concept of utility computing conjures up images of rack after rack of inexpensive computers—interchangeable commodity items where no one computer is more important than another. In general, this vision does not include thoughts of Microsoft software, but rather of free versions of Unix and Linux operating systems. As you might imagine, Microsoft is loathe […]