High
Bandwidth Server, Non Dedicated Server,
Inexpensive Dedicated Server, Fully Managed Dedicated Servers, What Is A
Dedicated Server, Bandwidth Dedicated Server
Web applications and services such as Google Apps, Drop- Box, Go.Pc, and others are increasingly popular and require from their providers enormous computing resources. For example, the number of unique visitors to Google Docs and Spreadsheets has surpassed 1.4 million in October 2007. Simultaneously, the used client-server architecture introduces an imbalance: a host managed by a service provider serves hundreds to thousands of user PCs. Even worse, the latter are treated as thin clients even if their processing capacity might be similar to those of the servers. Tapping the processing, storage and networking capacities of these non-dedicated resources for provisioning of web services and applications - already successful in the case of Skype, SETI @home and file sharing networks - promises to reduce the amount of required hardware basis by a two-digit factor . Consequently, this approach presents a significant cost slashing opportunity (on the order of millions of USD) for service providers and operators of cloud computing infrastructures. In this paper we investigate how a mixture of dedicated (and so highly available) hosts and non-dedicated (and so highly volatile) hosts can be used to provision a processing tier of a web service. The non-dedicated hosts are assumed to be either privately-owned (by volunteers) or institutionally owned commodity PCs with broadband Internet access.