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Lights On But No One Home At Sun Grid

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the please-leave-a-message-after-the-tone dept.

cygnusx writes "The Register reveals that Sun's pay-for-use grid computing services hasn't picked up a single customer yet." From the article: "The missing customers prove quite shocking when you consider that utility computing users must agree to be named in marketing programs as part of their contract with Sun - a fact learned by The Register and confirmed by a Sun spokeswoman. More than one year since it first started hyping the 'pay-for-use grid computing services' Sun is still weeks away from presenting a customer to the public. The program has proved much tougher to sell that Sun ever imagined."

5 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Price too high? by GGardner · · Score: 4, Informative

    There was a lot of debate the last several times this was posted about Sun's $1/cpu-hour price, how TCO is a lot more than hardware cost, etc. Still, a google search reveals a bunch of other companies who lease out CPU farms (mainly intended for rendering), who charge less than $1/cpu-hour.

  2. Most of us have friends and family by Work+Account · · Score: 3, Informative

    Many intelligent developers like Bram Cohen, the creator of Bittorrent, didn't have much while they were developing.

    IIRC he spent a year or two living frugaly with relatives or friends because he knew he had a great idea and wanted it done as soon as possible.

    Sure, he could have used some money, but he wasn't about to get a job and then have the company own his $8.7 million dollar idea (and that's just the current market value not including future potential revenue streams).

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    1. Re:Most of us have friends and family by Guspaz · · Score: 4, Informative

      No, he did so because he focuses on a problem to solve at the expense of other things. He didn't intend to turn BitTorrent into a business, and only founded the company because his father kept bugging him about it. He has Asbergers, a form of Autism, and it's an obsession with solving a problem that leads him to do what he does, not business sense.

      He didn't sit down and said "Hey, I have this great idea for content distribution that I think I can make money from."

      He's said this numerous times in various interviews.

  3. Not suprising, just do the math... by nweaver · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you have tasks that can be done on compute farms, computer farms and clusters have gotten relatively easy to manage and deploy and are CHEAP.

    Sun's charge of what, $1/CPU-hour is just way way way out of line compared with what you can build yourself (using dual core, dual processor athlons from Sun, for example), if you have any consistant demand.

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  4. It's just "time sharing", and it's obsolete by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative
    There used to be a scientific time sharing industry, with mainframe computer time rented by the minute. It's dead. Most commercial jobs you can do on PCs. If you have an ongoing need for more crunch power than that, you can get your own computing power, and it will be cheaper than renting it. The market for huge numbers of intermittent cycles is weak to nonexistent. The basic problem is that there just aren't many companies with giant number-crunching jobs for which they are willing to pay. For the same reason, there are very few privately owned supercomputers. There was a "grid computing" utility about two years ago, before Sun tried it, and they didn't get customers either.

    Sun's "grid computing" operation seems to be an attempt to find a use for unsold Sun servers, or at least to avoid writing their value down to scrap prices.

    f you went to a big hosting company and said you wanted a thousand unlimited-CPU-at-low-priority shared hosting accounts, valid only from 2300 to 0700, you could probably get a really good price. If "grid computing" were useful, somebody would be doing this. All those nearly idle CPUs could be doing something.

    There's a successful grid computing company: Akamai. What they sell is distributed hosting and cacheing, which they call "Akamai On Demand Managed Services". When the web site for the World Cup or NASCAR or Britney is getting millions of hits per hour during some special event, thousands of Akamai servers switch to serving those pages to handle the transient load. That's a successful "grid" application, and it's been working for years.

    Akamai does more than serve pages. You can run your business logic, in Java, on their servers. So they're already set up to run user code on their grid. If anybody is going to sell grid computing profitably, it's Akamai. They're all set up to do it. Yet they don't.