Slashdot Mirror
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.
I wonder how they plan to compete with the distributed/remote computing power provided by all of the unpatched and unprotected Windows based systems in the world that are freely available to anyone with a couple scripts and an internet connection?
This is just the reincarnation of the mainframe era. Everyone (Sun, MicroSoft, et al), want to put us back in the days where the storage/cpu and most importantly the applications themselves are in their "capable" hands.
I'm not even going to enertain the idea of having MY data stored on another (microsoft/sun/etc)server, and paying for the rights to access/modify it.
There is a reason it's called the PC,and not a dumb terminal.
Actually, I would imagine this would be more useful for solving larger problems that are run infrequently, where you want do do a distributd task once a month that takes 1000 machine hours and get back a result in 1 hour.
We've gone over this before. The price isn't bad. You don't buy time on this system when you have one CPU's worth of stuff to compute and don't need it for a years time.
You buy time on it when you need a LOT of CPUs worth of stuff done NOW.
Imagine you have some projection software package that you need to run once a quarter for your company. You need the data within a week of the beginning of the quarter. You require 10,000 CPU hours to get the numbers all crunched. It's the only "big-computing" job you have.
On one computer the task would take you a little over a years time (8544 hours in a year). That won't quite be up to the task, remember you need the job done in a week. That's 10,000 CPU hours to fit into 168 hours of real time. You'd neeed 60 processors chugging away for those 168 hours to get it done.
How much is a 60 CPU cluster going to cost you to build? It's not insanely expensive, but it's not cheap. It looks a lot better to you to build that cluster than to spend $40,000 a year though! Right?
Wait. Clusters take up space. A 70 CPU cluster (better add in a few for redundency since this job has to be done in time) is not going to fit in the broom closet. That floor space is going to cost you.
Hmm, those 60 CPUs throw off a lot of heat when they run. Better add some more cooling to the building. Another decent expense.
Damn, look at that electric bill from the extra 70 CPUs and cooling for them. This nickel and dime stuff is starting to add up.
And now for the killer. You've got a new 70-CPU cluster. Your going to need someone to manage it. Cluster work is a bit different from what's what your used to, and your IT staff is already busy with their current workloads. It's time to hire a guy to manage the cluster. BZZZZZZZZZT. That hire alone makes the $40,000 a year for grid CPU time a deal.
Work the numbers yourself. It's not really a bad deal if you only occassionally need massive computing.
Results n seconds.
Doing a quick read through I did not see exactly how large the cluster was, but there is no reason that Sun could not scale it to a few thousand nodes, providing results in a time frame that would be cost prohibitive for most companies to setup clusters to compute.
Come on, if you are running a huge simulation a few tmes a year, maintaining a 1000+ node cluster year round is just not cost efficient.
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