Sun's Grid Utility Expands Beyond the United States

Published: May 3, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Nearly two months ago, Sun Microsystems and a raft of software partners put a jukebox of sorts out onto its network.com Sun Grid compute and storage utility, greatly expanding its usefulness since end users don't have to get utility licensing from ISVs and then load them on the grid. The problem that Sun had, however, is that only companies in the United States could log in and buy capacity.

Starting today, however, the Sun Grid utility, which runs Solaris 10 and applications written for it by default, is now available in 24 additional countries in Europe and Asia/Pacific. Specifically, Sun is now allowing customers to log in and buy capacity on the utility from the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. To help spur demand for the utility in the 24 new countries, Sun is giving away 200 CPU hours of compute time to anyone--from a company or as an individual--who starts up an account. This is a limited time offering, which means Sun will kill it off when it has enough new users on the system or it runs out of capacity.

According to Rohit Valia, who is the group product manager for the utility, which is now part of Sun's Software group, Sun has just finished consolidating the grid utility into a new data center located in an undisclosed location in Nevada. "We picked a good place with lots of power, lots of cooling, and lots of bandwidth," says Valia.

In March 2006, the Sun Grid was located in three data centers--in California, in New Jersey, and in England--and that had over 5,000 first-generation Opteron processors. The latest implementation of the grid has only 1,000 processors, according to Valia, which suggests that Sun has scaled back its plans to push the product to corporations and to focus more on developers, who tend to use less capacity to develop their code. That doesn't mean that Sun doesn't want to sell capacity to run real workloads. It certainly does. But the appetite for utility computing is probably not strong yet as many--including Sun--had hoped.

The other interesting thing that Sun announced today is that the grid utility's application programming interfaces are being exposed so companies can deploy applications on the Sun Grid from within their own IT infrastructure, calling it as they would any other remote program. This API set is being offered in a limited beta right now.

The interesting bit about utility computing that can play into Sun's favor is that companies in emerging markets do not always have their own IT infrastructure, and for many such customers, it may make far more sense to rent computing cycles for certain jobs than to ever go down the road of buying servers and building their own clusters. The idea of infrastructure without a long-term commitment could turn out to be a competitive advantage, just like the lower cost of labor is.

Based on general spending trends in the IT market, the U.S. accounts for about 40 percent or so of the global IT spend, which should mean that by expanding into these 24 countries, Sun should have doubled addressable market of its grid utility. And when--and if--the utility ever goes completely global, it could grow by another 25 percent or so.

The great news for countries that have a strong currency relative to the U.S. dollar is that they can buy capacity on the utility for the same $1 per CPU per hour that companies or individuals in the United States pay. Europeans will be getting twice as much oomph for their euro, for instance. It will be interesting to see if companies based in the U.S. start moving workloads to offices in other countries to cash in on the lower cost per computing available in foreign currencies--if foreign is a word that even makes sense on the Internet.

RELATED STORIES

ISVs Preload Applications on the Sun Grid

Sun and ISVs to Load More Applications onto Grid Utility

Sun Gives Developers Free Access to Grid Utility, Other Goodies

The X Factor: If Sun Builds a Grid, Will They Come?

Hackers Take a Whack at the Sun Grid Utility

Sun Grid Compute Utility Opens for Public Business

Sun Plugs the Grid Some More, Adds Some Features

Sun Aspires to Be the General Electric of the Grid Era

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot