ISVs Preload Applications on the Sun Grid

Published: March 15, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As it promised it would do last fall, Sun Microsystems has worked with independent software vendors that have applications that are suitable to run on clusters of Solaris servers to deploy their applications in a utility fashion on the Sun Grid.

The Sun Grid, which is located at www.network.com on the Internet, is Sun's homegrown computing and storage utility, which first went online in March 2006. Sun had been talking about the Grid for a year before that, just as a new management team--the current one--was coming on board and looking for new ways to do computing and new ways to make money. While Sun got a lot of press off the utility computing idea, and exactly as it needed some as it was struggling to right its UltraSparc server and Solaris operating system businesses and get Opteron-based servers out the door, it is unclear if the Sun Grid is making the company any money or blazing a path toward the utility computing era that many of us (including myself) think is inevitable in the long run.

A year ago, the Sun Grid was located in three data centers--in California, in New Jersey, and in England--and had over 5,000 Opteron processors. It was based on an earlier generation of Opteron servers from Sun--the ones that Sun OEMed from Newisys before it decided to create its own designs, which we now know as the "Galaxy" line of servers. According to Rohit Valia, group product manager for the Sun Grid, the company is actually in the process of consolidating the utility down to an undisclosed location--maybe this is where Vice President Dick Cheney goes?--and down to 1,000 machines. Sun has not upgraded the utility to the Galaxy machines, even though they have been out for 18 months. Late last year, the Sun Grid was moved into Sun's Software group and put under control of Rich Green; it had been a separate unit until then. While Sun has been quiet about all of this, the fact is, the company is trying to cut costs and get more respectably profitable, and experiments like the Sun Grid have to carry their weight.

While the size of the Sun Grid may have declined, Valia says that Sun has over 1,000 companies and developers with accounts on the utility; developers initially got to use it for free last year, since Sun was trying to foster applications on the utility. Several government agencies and supercomputer labs have accounts, as do lots of developers. But Valia would not say how many paying customers are on the utility and how much computing capacity they burn. Part of the reason, of course, is that the Sun Grid is still new, and one of the problems--which today's announcements address in part--is that having utility computing and storage capacity on demand doesn't mean that applications are ready to be deployed on the utility.

Sun has built what it calls an application jukebox on the Sun Grid, which allows users to go to an ISV, buy a digital entitlement token for a certain amount of application usage time for a specific number of server nodes. Sun doesn't set the pricing for this ISV software, and according to Valia, it has no interest in saying how much it costs. Users then buy units of CPU-hours from Sun at $1 a pop, punch in the token data that unlocks the applications, upload their data, and away they go. The jukebox contains 20 applications so far, which are grid-enabled variants of Solaris-based applications for molecular modeling, electronic design automation, mathematical simulation, digital rendering, and other math-heavy applications that like parallel processing.

Now that applications are readily available, the Sun Grid should see an uptick in usage.

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