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:$1/CPU/hour?

[dsginter]

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.

bang for the buck

[cybergrunt69]

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.

Economics of Sun Grid Computing

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Computing@home

[Saiyine]

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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Re:No market there

[Cromac]

You joke, but MS Research has been working on building distributed computing into Windows for a while now. It probably won't be all that long until they either have a client, or something after Longhorn that will automatically distribute CPU load across a LAN.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Heats_Gr id_Iron_with_Bigtop/1104374194
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,2180,174 6291,00.asp

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.

Re:$1/CPU/hour?

[TheSHAD0W]

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!