For many enterprises, managed services have become a preferred means of deploying Web-based content and applications, combining low up-front acquisition costs with the convenience of outsourcing tedious server administration and maintenance. Yet for all but the simplest Web sites, MSPs (managed service providers) have typically required customers to procure processing and storage capacity in discrete units of a particular type of server over a set contract period—necessitated by the difficulties of partitioning, sharing, and allocating server resources among different customers.
