The Top Five Technologies You Need to Know About in '07

4. Hosted hardware: Supercomputing for the masses

Imagine a networking task for your large, small or home business that is so big you need an enterprise server to handle it. Now imagine being able to lease such a server on an on-demand basis. This ability to tap into a grid of supercomputing power the same way your house taps into the municipal water supply is the premise behind the concept of hosted hardware.

Large technology players such as IBM, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. already sell computing power to sizable corporations, typically on a large scale. But new services from the likes of Amazon.com Inc. and 3tera Inc. are bringing on-demand computing to midsize and small businesses. This concept is known as hosted hardware or grid computing. (Listen to the Computerworld TechCast: Grids.)

Not surprisingly, one of the key ingredients in this process is virtualization. (See the QuickStudy: Virtual Machines or listen to the Computerworld TechCast: Virtual Machines.) Here's how it works: On a per-demand basis, clients can choose to pay around 10 cents per virtual server per hour for access to spawned instances of virtual servers. In Amazon.com's case, these servers have the equivalent power of a server with a 1.7-GHz Xeon processor, almost 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive and a high-speed Internet connection.

Hot Technologies in '07  1. Ruby on Rails  2. NAND drives  3. Ultra-Wideband  4. Hosted hardware  5. Advanced CPU      architectures

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of hosted, grid-based computing is that it allows large corporations such as Amazon.com to lease the down cycles of their servers to smaller businesses. In fact, Amazon began selling similar services early last year. In March 2006, the company announced a Simple Storage Service (S3) that allows clients to store data on its servers at the rate of 15 cents per gigabyte per month, plus 20 cents per gigabyte of transferred data. In July of 2006, Amazon launched a Simple Queuing Service (SQS) that allows developers to move data and messages between the various components of noncentralized applications.

Grid computing has received considerable hype over the past few years, but given the increasing emphasis on enterprise efficiencies, 2007 could be its breakthrough year. How big is this potential market? Robert Rosenberg, president of analyst firm Insight Research Corp., sees what is essentially rental-based distributed computing becoming a $24.5 billion market by 2011. (To get a free executive summary or to purchase the full report, see the Insight Research site.)