Utility Computing Examples

The real benefit of utility computing comes from better control of your money. Traditional business data centers are almost always underutilized. Most business servers idle 85% of the time! This is because computer technicians are notorious for overbuying hardware in order to:
handle high workload peaks (such as the surge caused by holiday shopping!), to plan for future demand and for the unanticipated surges in demand. Utility computing allows companies to only pay for the computing resources they need, when they need them.

Despite recent problems with outages, Amazon Web Services is an excellent example of utility computing. Using the power of Amazon.Com's phenomenal technology infrastructure, customers can now lease computing power. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) permits customers to pay for computer resources by the hour and Simple Storage Service (S3) which lets customers pay based on storage capacity.

Another top quality service is Mozy Unlimited Backup which offers 2GB of totally free online backup and also unlimited backup space for $4.95/Month! After you signup online, you need to install a small program on your computer that gives you total control over what files you backup and how often. They have a very intuitive and easy to use program that lets you select broad categories of files for storage. I have been using the free 2GB service for my home computers; I only backup the really important files but soon I will break down and start backing up everything.