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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.
Let's say that you have some number crunching that will take about 7000 CPU hours. Are you going to be happier waiting a year for your desktop to solve the problem or would you pay $7000 to get the answer in one hour?
Sun is betting that there are many people/businesses that fall into the latter category.
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OK, so for one year of CPU time, maybe it is initially cheaper to buy a whitebox and install linux than it is to use this Sun solution.
However, if you got a linux whitebox to run this, not only would you have to worry about power costs, but also every other detail that comes with making sure your machine is running. What about patches, upgrades, network, bad hardware, runaway processes, general administration, backups, storage, etc? Most of the people here would be able to do the standard stuff that's needed, but I'm sure a business that needs "xyz" computed would gladly pay the 2x price. Not only would it do away with all the minor details, but they'd also have their results back in a significantly shorter amount of time! I'm too lazy to do math right now, but I'd say a year of cpu time could easily be done in less than month. That alone could be _the_ deciding factor and the justification for the expense.
--- "To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist!" -- Jesse Jackson
What about 3D rendering? There are lots of people renting time on render farms right now to make deadlines. If I can run PRrenderman on these CPUs, and the price includes storage for my rendered frames, it might be price competitive to buying a lot of processing speed that I'm not going to be using 24/7.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
1. cost for a CPU
2. cost for the box for the CPU
3. cost for data storage
4. cost for monitors
5. cost for cooling for above 1-4
6. cost for power for above 1-5
Now, ask yourself, will the price of power go down if oil will cost $100 (current median bet in the Oil Futures stock simulation using real dollars as per WSJ)?
yes, there are ways to reduce those costs. but not everyone can.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What about releasing a grid client so every one could earn some bucks by letting their cpus work for others?
You know, like the spam bots in windows, but getting money!
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Sun wants us to run an app on their powerful grid, but what do software vendors think about us running their single lincense across, say, 100 CPUs?
So now, on top of the $1/CPU/hr, we have to buy a license for each of those CPUs.
Or else this will be very good for open source.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Heats_Gr id_Iron_with_Bigtop/1104374194 4 6291,00.asp
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,2180,17
It may be on the back burner at MS for now, but as we've seen many times if they perceive a market they're missing out on they can throw enormous resources at a project to get it to market.
You forgot the convenience factor. You'd have to wait a week, twiddling your thumbs, while that cluster ground away at the data. If there's a problem with the data, you may not find out until the end of the week, at which time your bosses will be pissed because you'll be telling them the projections will be delayed.
With Sun's service, you'll probably get the result within a few hours, not a week. If there's a problem the tests can be re-run with plenty of time before the presentation.
Of course, your bosses may be even more displeased about the extra $10,000 cost of the run than they would've been about another week's delay. Hope you talk fast!
economics and scalability are not that simple to mix. Your $400 machine simply can't handle the dataset or the array sizes or the threads or much any metric you'd get when you size up any number of huge but very practical programs that businesses sometimes run. To name but one example: the monster linear systems that model supply chain and what-if a huge number of variables so the company can find the right product mix...the list of such programs is bigger than you may be aware.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
There's a wonderful technical paper analyzing the value of procrastination. Don't recall the details, but the upshot was that for certain computing problems long enough (on the order of years compuatation time), at some point it's just better to do nothing at all until the price of the hardware drops and the CPU speeds rise enough so that you can actually get the job done sooner than if you started running the job on what you had ASAP.
If you have computing job that will take 4 years on today's processors, and processors will be 4 times faster 2 years from now, better to do nothing for 2 years and then run the job on computers that will complete the job in 1 year, getting you done a year early including a 2 year vacation.
Wish I still had that paper...
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I don't know if you're a simple troll or a simple-ton, but either way your logic is utterly flawed.
I work producing a software product that I personally wouldn't use. Does that mean nobody would use it? Apparently not since my company is profitable and I get paid.
Also, 'backwards' is a matter of perspective. For ordinary home users who have trouble keeping their desktops clean and their start menus in order, don't keep backups of their data, and throw away their PCs every couple years because of viruses and spyware, a thin client solution would certainly be considered a step 'forward'.
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I'm thinking of my own employer, who's got hardware up the wazoo that mostly just sits around heating the building. Take payroll, for instance. They probably run some payroll batch job a couple times a month, then the rest of the time the computer that does payroll is just sitting around. Sure, you could run other stuff on it, but then when it came time to do the payroll everything would run slow and people would be upset.
The way I see it, this is perfect for all kinds of periodic batch-type business applications where you really want to have a dedicated machine but it won't be utilized all the time.
Also, machines that mostly sit around have about the same maintennence requirements as heavily-used hardware. They still need OS patches, security patches, backups, etc. And they need to get modified when the new head of IT decides logs should go in /var/tmp/messages instead of /var/adm/messages or whatever. I know my employer could probably get rid of 2/3 of its data center and a corresponding fraction of the high-priced administrators currently making everything run smoothly.
You could argue companies can do the same thing by balancing existing hardware, i.e. have one box host multiple "bursty" applications so the CPU doesn't have much idle time. But that takes lots of effort to manage, and it doesn't leave you any spare capacity when you need it. This way you don't need any spare capacity, and when your business grows you never have to worry about running out of rack space or lead times for new hardware.
The downside, of course, is you're trusting Sun to have the capacity available when you need it. In a way, it really is like a utility - Sun will be hoping its customers "bursts" will all average out to some managable load. I wonder if it's true.