As a team we were joking around the other day looking for new naming models that could properly reflect the self-managing, self-repairing nature of our Grid environment. And what became very clear was that we needed to create a new term that reflected the higher order policies associated with resource management - like financial/revenue arbitrage.

It’s one thing to talk about automated, lights out management, in which most if not all of the precipitating events are well known, and appropriate reactions coded in scripts. Further, you could allow for cascading events, and policy based (weighted) rules tied to a federating paradigm - btw, this is really starting to really reflect the state of the art here (fair harbour clause). But what happens when you actually bring financial/market driven rules and experiences into the solving of these problems? You get utility value optimizing automation… or the “Free Market Utilimatic” (there's a reason I'm not in branding)

Back in February we (Sun and Archipelago Holdings) described the potential of developing a commodity exchange for more traditional Data Center capabilities: network, compute and storage as they really are beginning to become commodities. We know that they’re commodities because of the competition across specific platforms that Sun and it’s competitors always face: it’s not a battle of speeds, feeds or features, but rather price that differentiates - in fact, that compute products are increasingly interchangeable, has been driven by buyers, our customers who wanted choice. As such, it’s fully appropriate that these commodity elements have a market derived value, and we all know that where there are free markets, there are people who trade in their futures. So if spot commodities and futures both have inherent value, then why cannot we leverage this value information to help us prioritize tasking (distributed scheduling), direct our resources (straight thru provisioning) and even help to plan the “onlining” of capacity (resource planning).

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