The reason utility computing has stayed on the shelf for the past decade or so is that the tools available to aspiring cloud providers (originally called ASPs, or application service providers) were no different than the tools available to the enterprise at the time: high-performance, scale-up hardware systems that were powerful, but expensive and inflexible.

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Do you scale-up to a high performance computing system or scale-out by just adding nodes to a distributed computing network?

FORBES: Big Data In the Enterprise: A Lesson Or Two From Big Brother

Among other things, Rypple lets users ask members of their networks to measure their performance against a scale, so they can track how they are doing over time.

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