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

[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.

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

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?

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....

Price too high?

[GGardner]

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.

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.

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.

Pssshhh thats because

[caffeinex36]

"My Zombie network has 1000000000x the computing power of suns grid....

and you can use mine for some good CC numbers. any company CLEARING doing a cost benefit analysis realizes that its much cheaper to go with me."

-Founder of P0wnd Zombi3 N3twerkz

Re:Most of us have friends and family

[Guspaz]

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.

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 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.

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.

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: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.