LinuxHam's Journal: Rejected article: IBM Introduces Utility Pricing

Don't have the text of the original submission, but IBM is introducing a new offering called e-Business On Demand. They run thousands of virtual Linux servers on mainframes and lease the servers to clients who want to outsource their entire IT infrastructure.

I thought the /. community would be interested because this is an effort by IBM to help companies toss their server farms out the window and replace them with Linux servers running offsite by IBM. IBM even offers all levels of backup/restore and system monitoring for the servers, too. Several different server configurations are available, too -- from web to database and file.

What's key is that customers pay for this just like they would any other utility. They pay for what they use, from processing power to network utilization, and the a-la carte service add-ons. According to C|Net, prices start at $300/month for the approximate power of a 333Mhz P-II running Linux.

A small office with 10-20 users would just get a T1 to the hosting facility, put together a server configuration with IBM, and not have to worry about managing servers in-house anymore. If you're concerned about network latency, I've worked with a customer that was large enough to house the mainframes in-house but still only pay for what they use. Plus, there is a product out there that acts as a Samba server caching engine, provding local LAN-speed access to frequently/recently accessed files that are actually stored on a remote Samba server.

I may be jaded since I'm an employee in the e-business group, but I think it's pretty cool.