During the last years, the costs for ICT infrastructures increased tremendously as a result of “one-application-one-platform” style deployment. This resulted in ICT infrastructures with extremely low system utilization and wasted resources. Examples can be found in virtually all areas of modern societies: One recent study of six corporate data centres reported that the bulk of their 1000 servers just utilized 10% to 35% of their available processing power. Another study estimated that the average capacity utilization rate of desktop computers is as low as 5%.
Furthermore overcapacity cannot only be observed with respect to hardware, but also to software. Highly scalable applications can serve additional users at almost no incremental costs - hence redundant installations of the same application create unnecessary costs.
In recent times, ICT is undergoing an inevitable shift from being an asset that companies posses to being a service that companies purchase from designated utility providers. This shift will take years to enfold, but the technical building blocks have already begun to take shape. On the coattail of this shift, the business model of utility computing or equivalently e-Business on-demand is more and more emerging.
This is where SORMA comes in to play. The objective of this project is the development of a platform that allows the dynamic trading of ICT resources “on-demand”. This platform is supposed to not only support the trading itself, but also the fulfilment of purchased resources. The internal resource management becomes in transparent for the users, who no longer have to be concerned on which resources their jobs are being used as long as they are performed in scope and in time.
The trading of resources is deemed promising to achieve a more rigorous allocation of resources and, in summary, the project SORMA will provide the necessary tools to achieve this goal via the trading of ICT resources.
Source: FEAST Focus #25, May 2007
