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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.
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