Sun is allowing firms to pay for grid computing by the hour
Sun’s vision of a huge web-connected computing resource pool charged for by utility pricing is finally about to go live in the US - but UK customers will be kept waiting for some time yet.
In his blog entry yesterday, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz confirmed that US users can try the Sun Grid Compute Utility service today and it will officially unveil the service this week. The service is accessible from www.network.com, a URL picked up with Sun’s acquisition of StorageTek.
The Sun Grid will let organisations upload applications, run them and pay by credit card at a rate of $1 per CPU per hour. The previously suggested additional tariff of $1 per gigabyte of storage appears to have been dropped, judging the by the latest FAQ.
The grid service is primarily aimed at firms with compute-intensive routines that need to be run on an occasional basis. Sun believes that the service will be a preferable alternative to capital expenditure on equipment and maintenance.
However, Schwartz said Sun has conceded that it will have to rely on a “long tail” of smaller companies rather than attracting blue-chip enterprises.
“Frankly, it's been tough to convince the largest enterprises that a public grid represents an attractive future,” he wrote. “[But] there are, after all, far more small financial institutions than large. The same applies to movie studios, pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and nearly every other industry on earth.”
Schwartz also said that the Sun Grid will initially only be available for customers inside the US, in order to abide by US government controls on technology export.
Even for the US, provisioning will at first take up to 24 hours in order for certain security routines to be run.
The service will begin with a total of under 5,000 CPU sockets – a mix of UltraSparc and Opetron processors – but that will later be increased. Web services APIs will also be available to allow hybrid ‘mash-up’ applications to be developed for the grid.
Most watchers expect the Sun Grid to have niche appeal but some praised the boldness of the strategy.
“This is very much a 1.0 initiative and companies have traditionally done lots of due diligence before using other people’s hardware but it’s great to see it,” said Dale Vile of analyst Freeform Dynamics. “Someone has to start the ball rolling for issues such as enterprise software licensing to be addressed.”
Neil Ward-Dutton of analyst Macehiter Ward-Dutton said, “This is a bold move that hasn’t really been tried before although IBM is using its HiPods (High-performance On-Demand Solutions) team as a pre-sales tool. The problem is that a lot of companies that have built grids have a lot of time invested in them and they are seen as real differentiators for companies such as pharmaceutical firms in new drug discovery, or in oil exploration. Sun Grid might appeal to smaller firms but it’s hard to start up in pharmaceuticals in a garage.”
Sun’s vision of a huge web-connected computing resource pool charged for by utility pricing is finally about to go live in the US - but UK customers will be kept waiting for some time yet.
In his blog entry yesterday, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz confirmed that US users can try the Sun Grid Compute Utility service today and it will officially unveil the service this week. The service is accessible from www.network.com, a URL picked up with Sun’s acquisition of StorageTek.
The Sun Grid will let organisations upload applications, run them and pay by credit card at a rate of $1 per CPU per hour. The previously suggested additional tariff of $1 per gigabyte of storage appears to have been dropped, judging the by the latest FAQ.
The grid service is primarily aimed at firms with compute-intensive routines that need to be run on an occasional basis. Sun believes that the service will be a preferable alternative to capital expenditure on equipment and maintenance.
However, Schwartz said Sun has conceded that it will have to rely on a “long tail” of smaller companies rather than attracting blue-chip enterprises.
“Frankly, it's been tough to convince the largest enterprises that a public grid represents an attractive future,” he wrote. “[But] there are, after all, far more small financial institutions than large. The same applies to movie studios, pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and nearly every other industry on earth.”
Schwartz also said that the Sun Grid will initially only be available for customers inside the US, in order to abide by US government controls on technology export.
Even for the US, provisioning will at first take up to 24 hours in order for certain security routines to be run.
The service will begin with a total of under 5,000 CPU sockets – a mix of UltraSparc and Opetron processors – but that will later be increased. Web services APIs will also be available to allow hybrid ‘mash-up’ applications to be developed for the grid.
Most watchers expect the Sun Grid to have niche appeal but some praised the boldness of the strategy.
“This is very much a 1.0 initiative and companies have traditionally done lots of due diligence before using other people’s hardware but it’s great to see it,” said Dale Vile of analyst Freeform Dynamics. “Someone has to start the ball rolling for issues such as enterprise software licensing to be addressed.”
Neil Ward-Dutton of analyst Macehiter Ward-Dutton said, “This is a bold move that hasn’t really been tried before although IBM is using its HiPods (High-performance On-Demand Solutions) team as a pre-sales tool. The problem is that a lot of companies that have built grids have a lot of time invested in them and they are seen as real differentiators for companies such as pharmaceutical firms in new drug discovery, or in oil exploration. Sun Grid might appeal to smaller firms but it’s hard to start up in pharmaceuticals in a garage.”
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