AC Capital Partners to Run Portfolio Models on Sun's Grid

Published: June 28, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In May, Sun Microsystems opened up access to its Sun Grid compute and storage utility, which is actually housed on a data center in a desert somewhere in the United States, so that companies in 24 countries outside of the U.S.--mostly in Europe and Asia--could start making use of the product. And one of the latest customers to sign up for capacity on the utility is AC Capital Partners, an Irish asset management firm that has over $40 billion in asset-backed securities and other funds under its control.

The software that AC Capital uses is called CDOSheet, and it is a financial risk and pricing modeling software program from CDO2. (CDO is short for centralized debt obligation, and it is probably about as meaningful to you as server virtualization hypervisor is to a banker.) As it turns out, CDO2, which is based in London, offers its software as a service and runs it on its own internal grid setup. But now that the Sun Grid has been extended beyond the United States, the company has decided to decommission its own grid and just host its software on the Sun utility. This is exactly the kind of maneuver that Sun's utility computing enthusiasts want to see independent software vendors take. AC Capital pays CDO2 for its usage on the grid, and CDO2 turns around and pays Sun for the CPU and storage capacity that its customers burn.

Because Sun has opened up the APIs into the grid this year, along with providing a jukebox of code from ISVs that customers can just hook into from their own data centers, AC Capital can invoke the CDOSheet software using the same means it did before, and its own applications do not even know it is not running locally or in the CDO2 data center. This opening up of the APIs also means that AC Capital keeps control of its own data, and rather than trying to upload gigabytes or terabytes of information to the Sun Grid, the Sun Grid just accesses the storage through a secure link to run the application.

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