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

It's entirely SUN's own fault

[Work Account]

You don't embark on a large project of ANY kind without at least securing a customer or two during the development process.

Unless of course you're doing something with free software like Bittorrent where you don't need to money and everything else is cost neglible.

Re:It's entirely SUN's own fault

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The problem with that comment is that free software development is often done as a hobby, not as a paying job. Sometimes it can be used to make a name for yourself too, though that's a pretty elusive goal.

Re:It's entirely SUN's own fault

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't embark on a large project of ANY kind without at least securing a customer or two during the development process.

True enough, but requiring your customers to add their name to your advertising campaign? that's silly.

Suggest it, maybe even request it after proven performance, but don't require it.

Re:It's entirely SUN's own fault

[SocietyoftheFist]

Sun misread the market? Well duh, they've been doing that for a few years now. Sun seems to think an awful lot of themselves, and they do make a hell of a UNIX, but they don't drive the market, the market drives the market and they don't seem to realize it.

Re:It's entirely SUN's own fault

[Craig Ringer]

Yep... but for all we know they did have customers lined up as it was being built. It wouldn't be the first time that a customer goes on and on and on about how great something will be and how much they're looking forward to it, then when it comes time to hand over the money they "reevaluate their priorities".

Technology companies, especially those customising software for a client, know what this is like all too well.

Re:It's entirely SUN's own fault

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a Sun Employee

The Register has, to some extent, got it's self mixed up.

The Grid Utility offering currently exists in 2 flavours which are still fairly fluid and are evolving to meet the markets needs.

The first is a 'enter your credit card number on our secure website, submit your job and wait for the results' ('Retail Grid') which has been on limited release to early access customers for a while now. I think the reason there has been little publicity around which customers which use this part of the service is because this model isn't contract based. As I understand it, people signing up on the website do not necessarily have an agreement with Sun over publicity.

The second model (the 'Commercial Grid') is a more tailored customer grid which does involve contracts and engineering development work whereby a customer is expected to return to the grid periodically to use 'their grid environment'.
This service has been in use for many months and although this part of the service *was* slightly delayed, we currently have a significant number of customers and potential customers who are conducting testing and running jobs on the Commercial SunGrid.
One thing we aren't suffering from is a lack of interest,

Also, The Register seems to have forgotten about this: http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3 529891

Re:It's entirely SUN's own fault

[Jimmy The Leper]

Probably not, but without amatures the airplane would never have been invented.

Duh..

[shbazjinkens]

Well, it isn't like computers are so prohibitively expensive that everyone is rushing to use this anyway.

Re:Duh..

[elmegil]

Sun's solution isn't really cheaper than a company doing it yourself.

Because, after all, those machines are all self-maintaining and configuring.

Re:Duh..

[LurkerXXX]

Brilliant. You've gotten your bean counters to cut a check and 350 dual-core, dual-processor Opterons are in a truck outside. Where are you going to put those 350 machines? You need some space. Another expense. That's a lot of hardware. Even being up for a month they are going to use a lot of electricity. Hmm, damn, it's hot in the room now. 350 high end dual-cpu machines generate a lot of heat, so now you need to back to the bean counters again and ask for money to buy extra AC units and have the HVAC guys hook those into your building. It's not cheap, but still cheaper than Sun!

Great. Now you need to buy a bunch of racks and equipment to connect those 350 machines togeather. Make that 350+, with that many going, your likely to experience some hardware failures. Your getting to be close personal friends with the bean counter. It's not cheaper, but it's gotta be cheaper than Sun.

Now we're cooking with gas. Now you you just need to hire someone who knows what the hell they are doing to hook them up in a workable cluster, tweak the hell out of it to get anywhere decent performance... hmm. Gotta either hire a body or contract out. HR won't want a body for short term. Ah well, better hire the expensive contractor since this is all going to close down in a month. Hey Mr. Beancounter, I need a contractor that's worked with big clusters before to spend some time here. Ouch, one who is really good, available, and will do it well and quickly is not gonna be cheap. $$$. Oh, and hope they don't botch the job so that it takes hiring another contractor (and more time) to do it right...

Ahh, finally. We've cranked through the job. Excellent Now we just have to go back to our friend Mr Beancounter and have him put 350+ odd machines on Ebay for us, plus the racks, switches, cables. Oh, and the big AC units... hmm, some of this might take quite a bit of time to sell to start recouping the money. Ah well, our beancounter wasn't going to be doing much else for the next few months. Or won't be now anyhow. Oh, plus we need to have someone tear down and box everything up. Probably for shipping to 1000 different places. Hmm, and the HVAC guys will have to come uninstall the extra AC units. But in a few months I'm sure we'll have back part of the costs of those machines!

A bit of a hassle, no? A big expense. You might, just might come out cheaper than if you went with Sun. Then again, you could just cut a check to Sun, know the job will go into their queue, and you will probably have your data back from them in a few days.

Sometimes it's just easier to pay someone who does that stuff for a living.

Re:Duh..

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post is absurd.

Before getting to your post, Sun missed the market. Those who can pay the extravagent costs WANT the computations done in house due to liability, secrets/privacy/control, and esteem/pride issues. Those who really want this service CANNOT pay the hourly cost, iow Sun has established they are too small or they cannot recover costs from catering to those customers. Most high end renderers can't afford the hourly cost; those in finances already have their own resources.

"Now you need to buy a bunch of racks and equipment to connect those 350 machines togeather."

What the hell. Like this is hard if you just sourced 350 x 2 processors and 350 motherboards and 350+ sticks of mem?

And that's overlooking why'd you'd rack these up. You don't need racks to slit holes into a $10 piece of metal to frame these up. The most difficult part is reducing the number of power supplies, which is not that difficult of a problem either. Even sequencing these up is trivial given the ATX spec. A single person could have this up for a pay scale of $10,000 a month.

"Now you you just need to hire someone who knows what the hell they are doing to hook them up in a workable cluster, tweak the hell out of it to get anywhere decent performance... hmm."

This is bullshit. How is this ANY different than compared to running on Sun's system where you have to develop the software to run on their particular (closed, unchangeable) configuration. I would also say that it's easier to do on your cluster, given you can reconfigure it minimally, IF it became necessary and you determined it was a hardware setup issue. Plus, most clustering software will be programmed to maximally configure itself anyways, if not innantely by the nature of the computations being done.

"Where are you going to put those 350 machines?"

Land and space is ridiculously cheap stateside. You stupid enough to put this in the middle of a downtown area or something? Where I am, you can get a 2 story standalone 2,500 square foot commercial building with 3 phase power for under $1,400 a month. Need network space? Go down one state and the real estate is the same plus cheap DS3 connections.

"That's a lot of hardware. Even being up for a month they are going to use a lot of electricity."

Err, no. Certainly not compared to $1,000 an hour or more. Run a self-built cluster for a full day, the savings would immediately offset (compared to paying Sun) 3 months of electricity usage and pay for the whole year in real estate costs.

"Hmm, damn, it's hot in the room now. 350 high end dual-cpu machines generate a lot of heat, so now you need to back to the bean counters again and ask for money to buy extra AC units and have the HVAC guys hook those into your building."

Here in the NE in the US, 9 months out of the year you'll simply need to run fans to vent to the outside. The thermal mass of the whole damn acreage outdoors trumps your AC units. Do not make the mistake that AC is the answer; mass airflow is the answer. Oh, I forgot, you're stuffing your setups into closed little racks and rackmount cases so they choke--my mistake.

"It's not cheap, but still cheaper than Sun!"

It's a HELL of a lot cheaper than Sun if you run computations regularly. Heck, the case in point indicates this to be true because NO ONE has paid for their services. Have you? No. Has anyone else? No. Sun's cluster is a novelty right now.

"We've cranked through the job. Excellent Now we just have to go back to our friend Mr Beancounter and have him put 350+ odd machines on Ebay for us, plus the racks, switches, cables. Oh, and the big AC units... hmm, some of this might take quite a bit of time to sell to start recouping the money."

Gimme a goddamn break! You're probably paying Mr. Beancounter more than you'd pay the IT guy setting this up. Mr. Beancounter would be smart enough to set this up as a division and separate company, which leads to immediate tax breaks such that $125,0

Re:Duh..

[LurkerXXX]

I would dare say you have never run a company, never even looked to comprehend taxes for a business, and worse, never setup a cluster greater than 25 machines or even read an online research paper about clusters.

And I would dare say you didn't even read the post I was replying to where he spacifically stated he would buy it, use it for one month, then sell it. Not

If it meets the need, it stays there to be run the next time or quarter without ANY cost to the company in terms of additional hardware.

That's specifically NOT what the grandparent proposed. Learn to read.

It's a HELL of a lot cheaper than Sun if you run computations regularly.

No doubt. That's why people who do need a cluster regularly buy their own. Sun intends this for folks who don't need it regularly and would rather farm it out than to buy a cluster, run it for a week or two a year, and otherwise have it sit idle. It's not worth it.

Of course it might be to your, with your your nice big rented warehouse, computers set up on old rusty filing cabinets or whatever spare rubbish you can find to pass for deskspace. I'm sure it would come out cheaper for you. I'm just not sure how happy your boss will be when you tell him that your sorry, but it's warm for June, and he might going to have to wait 4 or 5 months till it gets cool enough outside for you to crank up your cluster.

I'm sure someone has put you in charge of a large cluster... They'd deserved what they got I'm sure.

Secret Projects?

[HTH NE1]

Does this mean that the only reason why someone would want such computing power is because they want to run projects they wouldn't want the public to know about?

Re:Secret Projects?

[xtracto]

Does this mean that the only reason why someone would want such computing power is because they want to run projects they wouldn't want the public to know about?

No.

The basis of their project is that it would be better for companies to buy processing time than to build their own distributed processing network.

Of course it is interesting to see who (in the real world) are those companies?. If we suppose they are some top-notch companies that use a lot of processing power (like stock market companies wanting to run their models) they may preffer (and they may already have) to run their own servers to protect their secrets.

If they are not so big companies with not too much data then they may have enough power with a beowulf cluster of this-and-that.

The main problem I see here is that any company willing to "buy" this power have to ponder at least this two issues:
- They have to give their data and algorithms.
- They have to relay on SUNs servers stability.

Now, I think the theory behind this service is quite good and, I am thinking to use it as an application case for my risk management on multi agent systems thesis. But I hope when I start looking at the test cases there are at least some companies over there using it.

Re:Secret Projects?

[monkeydo]

The Register concludes that because Sun hasn't publicly announced any customer, that there aren't any. But, they based their conclusion on a false premise. Just because the standard agreement for this service contains a publicity clause, doesn't mean that it will remain in whatever contract is actually executed. If $customer came to Sun and said they wanted to use your service, only if they would strike the publicity clause from the contract, Sun may have been willing.

Cost of porting, uncertain future of the service

[UR30]

Who would be willing to commit their resources to running applications on this system, which has no guarantee of existing after a couple of years? Selling computer platforms to customers, or providing a comprehensive ASP-style solution are more straightforward business models. And can Sun guarantee that data and applications will be secure on their grid system?

Important Question

[Tiberius_Fel]

An important question is whether this is a failure of marketing or a poor choice of target market. If the target market exists but is not using it, then you might be able to consider it a failure of marketing: There is demand and supply, but the demand is not aware of the supply. If the target market does not exist, then Sun has obviously chosen to go into an area which is not a worthwhile venture, at least at the present time.

Though, it's possible that the target market hasn't been formed yet and Sun is going for the "If you build it, they will come"; i.e. by creating the possibility they will generate demand for it in the future.

Re:Most of us have friends and family

[RingDev]

So the answer is for coders to live off well-fair and with their parents?

Personally, I think that idea sucks. I'd much rather atleast get some VC to survive off of and launch an LLC to get the product up.

-Rick

Perhaps this is just a "hey its there, sell it!"

[aphaenogaster]

I am sure Sun had massive computer power just laying around, they probably realized they could leverage it as a commodity while investing nothing but RandD they were going to do anyway. If MS and Google and all plan on huge ajax like projects, sun may very well have something in the future. :"who needs more than 64kb anyway!"

Re:Ha ha

[LilGuy]

Remember any of the retarded movies made last year? Or in the past 5 years for that matter?

I don't. Until I go to the movie store and can't find anything worth watching in the New Releases (because 5 year old movies are still considered new releases half the time).

Seems to me, big industries are much more error-prone than the little guys. They can afford to be.

Problem is...

[dshannon]

... that I (as an EA) don't really understand the proposition and what I can do with it. Sure I've read the blurb, I've even been to Menlo Park and had the presentation, but the question I want to answer is *what* of all my core apps I'm going to run on it. Do I get to go to Oracle grid on this stuff? Can I run all my core back office apps on it? What do I pay on top of the $1/cpu/hr? Bandwidth back to head office?

On top of all that, it's clear that I'm not going to abandon our existing investment in Sun hardware to take immediate advantage of this while that hardware still has a leasing life of 2-3 years. Sure I'm interested, it doesn't particularly benefit the company to have a stack of office space devoted to a computer room, and it's harder still when the business grows fast and we constantly need more gear. But Sun aren't in my face about this stuff, aren't giving me the numbers I need to take it to the CIO. When they do, then I'll think about it.

On the other hand, Sun are to be congratulated on their other initiatives in this kind of pricing model. To an enterprise with small numbers of staff but high revenue, their per FTE/yr software licensing on Java Enterprise System et al is a wonderful model which many other vendors will have to catch up with as we move to multi-core CPU's as standard. For us, the other J2EE vendors just can't compete on price (FOSS excluded of course).

Utility computing is coming, let's face it - but mainly it's a question of education of the masses, and time to get through hardware replacement cycles. Of course I'm a bit surprised that there's NO customers yet, but that still doesn't mean there won't be, ever.

It's all about the applications.

[khasim]

People don't buy a computer to run a processor.

People want to run applications.

The thing I'm not seeing in Sun's model is anything about the applications. Are they off-the-shelf? Who installs them? Who maintains them? What OS's are available? What security is available? How can I make sure that no one else sees my data?

We've already been through with with the Application Service Providers (ASP's) and there are still a few out there making money by providing Internet access to their apps, running on their servers, storing and processing your data. Payroll is an easy app for that.

I think Sun is missing part of the equation.

Re:Ha ha

[morgan_greywolf]

Seriously though, why would someone subscribe to this service? Its not like computers are overly expensive anymorew and there is a fairly broad base of expertise to draw upon nowadays for system admin services.

Ever manage a grid before? I have. Once you get beyond a few machines and start running enough jobs to fully utilize all that hardware, management becomes a non-trivial task.

Some companies may want to utilize a grid, say for rendering, but they don't have the IT resources to manage such a system. Especially if their rendering needs aren't so great that they need a grid system full-time -- think small CGI studios or architectural firms that use visualization -- they won't be able to afford the IT resources to manage such a system, either.

That's why there exist service bureaus that have large rendering farms available for hire. Only many of them charge much less than $1/cpu-hour.

Target Market is the problem

[puppetluva]

Anyone who is savvy enough to need GRID computing is savvy enough to build their own grid very cheaply. Sun's GRID would only be useful for times where one's own grid is overloaded for brief periods of time and you don't want to scale up (a confluence of factors that is very hard to predict and order from Sun ahead of time).

I'm surprised that there wasn't more of a business analysis of this ahead of time before they plunked down a ton of money to make it happen.

It's plain too expensive

[Stephan Schulz]

I'm a potential user. I have a program that has an infinite number of strategies to tackle hard search problems, and a benchmark library of 8000 problems. Much of my work is to find out which strategies work well on which classes of problems.

I'm currently using our university student lab. But this is a mix of various machines, from 300MHz Sun Ultra 60 to 900 MHz SunFire machines, some of them limited in memory, and all used by students for their own nefarious purposes (e.g. pr0n and Quake). I'd love to be able to set 100 or so identical processors to the job. I could keep them fed for months. But at $1/CPU-hour, a day on 100 machines is $2400. I can buy 6 low-end Athlon machines for that money (and they will be just as good for the job). Yes, I do save in electricity and administration, but these costs are a) low for my application and b) come out of other budgets. For scientific work, SUN's prices are not acceptable. I would be tempted at a price of 1ct/CPU-hour. I would immediately buy into the thing for 0.1ct/CPU-hour with low-priority (i.e. I get to use only otherwise free processors).

Re:Price too high?

[Surt]

Looking at it on a per cpu per year basis doesn't capture when this would be useful. Suppose you needed 1000 cpus for a week, but then your data analysis project would be done for the year. Better to buy yourself the 1000 cpus or to rent them?

Re:Aircraft designed and built by amatures[sic]

[RingDev]

Yup, and every year we get dive bombed in Madison. People joke about it, every year for the fly in you hear things like "If you live on the east side of town, its time to start wearing a helmet again". I can't remeber the last fatality free Oshkosh EAA fly in.

-Rick

Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

85% / 90% of Office Resources is in Windows! How do you think I can format the HD from the raw BIOS with a VBA macro?