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

They never called me back..

[erwin]

I sent an email inquery to them right after it was announced, and no one ever contacted me. I even talked to someone at Sun (a different division), and still never heard from them....

New system, new market, enterprise products

[jiushao]

Not that suprising at this point, it is a new system, it tries to create a new market and it does so in the enterprise space. Things don't suddenly catch on when it comes to enterprise data service, Sun has to offer the service to get the talk going and in another few years we will really know if it turns out good or not. It is much too early to make any judgements about the feasability of the project.

Personally I think the idea might work, but it might not in this incarnation. There seems to be a fair chance that Sun can claim to be ahead of its time again, which has in some ways been a while. Which is a good thing in itself, Sun has historically been a nice company to work with but has suffered from some stagnation for a number of years.

Re:It's entirely SUN's own fault

[eln]

When you develop a project like this, you usually need to have enough money to run it profit-free (and even revenue-free) for some period of time so you don't need to have customers commit to buying vapor from you in order for the thing to work.

That being said, however, you still need to have done some realistic market research. They should have at least contacted some friendly organizations (current customers mainly) to gauge actual interest in this thing beyond just the "that sounds cool" stage. The larger the financial risk involved in the project, the more market research needs to be conducted to mitigate that risk.

It sounds almost like someone at Sun got a "really cool" idea, and everyone else at Sun thought it was super cool too, and no one bothered to ask anyone on the outside. Or if they did, they only paid attention to the ones that said it was cool and ignored the others. Or they only asked people if it was cool, and never asked them if they would buy it if it were available.

It seems like Sun badly misread the market here, and I would assume someone in their marketing department is going to have a very bad day in the near future.

Not for science

[PineGreen]

I know why they don't get any science customers from my own experience. Basically, if you buy a cluster of your grant, you pay just for the hardware, everything else: electricity, cooling, network, comp support comes from the department's budget. These costs are not negligible.

If you tried to buy time from Sun, then everything goes from your budget... So, for an average scientist, who might be interested it is much cheaper to buy my own little cluster and piggyback on department's infrastructure...

lots of reasons

[bcrowell]

Lots of possible reasons for this:

1. Grid computing is a different style of computing. It requires a lot of software work to set it up, and not many people have experience with that style of programming. There are costs associated with all that. There are also inefficiencies in grid computing, e.g., you may not get your CPU time at exactly the moment you wanted it.
2. $1/hour is $86,000/year, which is two orders of magnitude more than the cost of a headless cpu that you throw away a year later.
3. Sun's business prospects look uncertain, and nobody wants to commit themselves to a ship that may not be afloat in 10 years.
4. Many potential customers are military types, who would have security concerns.
5. Many potential customers are academic types, who may already be getting the job done with systems like seti@home.
6. Many potential customers are engineers, who think it sounds like a lot more fun to run their own machines.
7. IT managers would like to expand their feudal domains rather than outsourcing their work and therefore losing power, prestige, and staff. If the computation was being done off-site, the next obvious question for the managers' bosses would be why shouldn't they cut in-house computing resources.

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

[ChaosDiscord]

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.

It's a small market, but not nonexistant. Anyone doing high-energy physics needs as much processing power as they can get. Companies doing genetics research (say, researching gene therapy) tend to need lots of compute time doing massive searches and comparisions of genetic databases. Insurance companies doing simulations and analysis need massive computing power. Special effects companies chew through computer time.

There is no question that massive amounts of compute power are needed. The question is: is it actually cheaper to rent the CPU time instead of just buying and managing the machines themselves? I'm less certain on that. While someone else has to worry about buying and maintaining the machines, you need to modify your workload to work on machines you don't control. The remote site may upgrade to an incompatible system to serve other customers. They could configure themselves to run whatever OS loadout you want, but that will cost more to setup and maintain. You typically need to send your workload across the public internet; putting gigabit ethernet between your cluster nodes so you can toss 2 gigabyte data sets around is relatievly ship. Getting a big enough network connection to set those datasets across the country is more expensive. Running over the internet is also more fragile. Oops, a backhoe just took out the connection. When something goes wrong, why does the provider care? Doing it in house means you have local staff you can lean on. A provider can be made to care, to provide guaranteed response times, but it'll cost you even more.