Sun Grid Utility Goes Live for Employees

museumpeace writes "CNET is reporting that Sun Microsystems turned on its Grid computing utility, hosting large ERP applications for its employees to test out the server infrastructure and user acceptance of the Computing-as-metered-utility model. General availability is scheduled for October. The rates? "Sun is offering processing and storage in a pay-as-you-go arrangement of $1 per CPU per hour, delivered via an Internet connection". Sun is still retooling its Thin Client interfaces and support SW. Experts quoted in the article wonder if Sun can make any money this way." Slashdot also covered the original announcement back in February.

Comments

Re:Everything Old is New Again

[oldmanmtn]

There is a reason it's called the PC,and not a dumb terminal.

There are no dumb terminals - only dumb users.

This isn't targeted at PC users. This is for (for example) the hedge fund that needs 50 machines for 8 hours, once a week, to run a complex model. This gives them the power they need for a fraction of the price of the raw hardware, and they don't have to pay anybody to maintain it.

I've had projects where I really wanted 1000 CPUs for a week, just so I could do scalability testing. There's no way we could afford $1,000,000 to buy 1000 machines just for that one test, but we could probably have swung $50,000 to get them for five 10 hour days or ten 5 hour days.