Utility Computing: Show or Tell?

I fell asleep.

Now lets flash back nearly a year earlier, when Sun unveiled its N1 utility computing vision. The folks at Sun talked about what N1 is and how it's supposed to work, but they went one step further--they demo'd it.

A Sun employee took the stage in front of a terminal to set up a mythical service to sell books online. Instead of telling us how N1 would automatically provision the resources needed to set up the service, he answered a series of online questions about required average lookup time, average buy time, chargeback costs for the infrastructure and other service-level information.

The Sun employee then pressed the magic button and, presto, the N1 demo software immediately created a logical map of the services infrastructure for approval. Once the logical map was approved, the application automatically grabbed the amount of server and storage resources from to the network that it needed to give the specific quality of service, as determined by the employee.

I was wide awake.

For the first time, I grasped the concept of utility computing. And that happened despite the fact that the Sun N1 demo was a fake--which the Sun folks made clear--and no such software existed. Sun had only just acquired some of the storage and server provisioning software needed to make N1 a reality, and hadn't even started integrating it into N1.

I'm not saying Sun's utility computing vision is any better than HP's or any other vendor's. But whenever vendors try to explain their vision--and by my count there are at least seven visions so far--my point of reference isn't what they are saying but instead what I remember about that Sun demo.

They say a picture paints a thousand words. I say a demo paints a thousand PowerPoint slides. Keep that in mind if your customers return a blank stare when you try to explain your utility computing offering, once it becomes a reality.

Still readin' and writin',
Joseph Kovar

JOSEPH F. KOVAR is the storage editor for CRN .