Supernets and snHubs: A Foundation for Public Utility Computing

The notion of procuring computer services from a utility, much the way we get water and electricity and phone service, is not new. The idea at the center of the public utility trend in computer services is to allow firms to focus less on administering and supporting their information technology and more on running their business. Supernets and their implementation as hardware devices (snHubs) are our approach to make networks part of the public utility computing (PUC) infrastructure. The infrastructure is a key to integrating and enabling such "remote access" constituencies as B2B, out-sourcing vendors, and workers who telecommute in a safe and scalable manner. We have designed, developed, and deployed a prototype whose viability is now being demonstrated by a small deployment throughout Sun Microsystems.