Lights On But No One Home At Sun Grid

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."

Comments

Not suprising, just do the math...

[nweaver]

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.

It's just "time sharing", and it's obsolete

[Animats]

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.