Sun have announced their plans to offer businesses a simple way of doing I.T., by utilising the power of grid computing. For the price of $1 per cpu hour, business customers can tap into massive computer grids run by Sun. Sun believe that by doing the service "on-demand" they can offer a more cost effective way of computing to businesses worldwide. The company claims to have thousands of CPUs accessible on a truly global scale; so far they have announced centers in Texas, Virginia, New Jersey and Scotland; the company plans to announce more new centers in the USA, Europe and Asia in 2005.
Scott McNealy, chairman and CEO of Sun said "Today Sun has taken the next big step in offering IT as a utility and is the first vendor to truly deliver on the promise of an open, standardized grid. As the IT industry continues to evolve, customers will need to move away from building data centers in a one-off customized model toward a standardized model and eventually to a utility model. Sun's $1/cpu-hr and $1/GB-mo compute and storage offerings provide the right answers for customers worldwide to take advantage of IT as a service. It's imperative that CIOs and CFOs benchmark their own data centers to see how they stack up against the one buck threshold."
The system is powered by chips from AMD; AMD chairman Hector Ruiz said "With the introduction of dual-core versions of the AMD Opteron processor planned for mid-year, AMD will enable the ultimate hardware platform for delivering the full potential of Solaris 10 and the Sun Grid". Sun are launching the service today alongside a variety of other new services; the company has reduced the price of its Java enterprise system to $50 per employee with unlimited use per year. Combined with the grid computing initiative, the company could be onto a winner if businesses recognise the service as a cheap and efficient way of running IT.
Sun recently started distributing its operating system, Solaris 10, under a "open source" license. However, critics have suggested that Sun's deal with Microsoft in April 2004 could potentially hurt developers who release under the license. Until Sun provides serious legal clarification or indemnification to developers, interest in the program will be limited.
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