Sun next up on pay-as-you-go bandwagon

Sun, which once shunned services in favor of selling big, expensive boxes, is the latest to jump on the pay-per-use utility computing bandwagon with a new grid offering that promises to bring users computing power on demand.

It’s not Sun’s first move in the utility computing arena. Sun’s N1 strategy, unveiled more than two years ago, is aimed at helping customers pool resources so they can grow and shrink according to business demands. However, Sun Grid compute and storage utility offerings — which Sun highlighted at its quarterly launch event this week — represent a shift for Sun because they will be delivered on a hosted basis. The service will be available from six regional data centers in the next few months, according to Sun executives.

“They’re becoming a service provider,” says Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group. “They can now offer [compute and storage] on a pay-as-you-go basis. Instead of ‘we’ll allocate this to you,’ you only pay for what you’re using, and they guarantee as much headroom as you could possibly want.”

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Sun, which once shunned services in favor of selling big, expensive boxes, is the latest to jump on the pay-per-use utility computing bandwagon with a new grid offering that promises to bring users computing power on demand.

It’s not Sun’s first move in the utility computing arena. Sun’s N1 strategy, unveiled more than two years ago, is aimed at helping customers pool resources so they can grow and shrink according to business demands. However, Sun Grid compute and storage utility offerings — which Sun highlighted at its quarterly launch event this week — represent a shift for Sun because they will be delivered on a hosted basis. The service will be available from six regional data centers in the next few months, according to Sun executives.

“They’re becoming a service provider,” says Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group. “They can now offer [compute and storage] on a pay-as-you-go basis. Instead of ‘we’ll allocate this to you,’ you only pay for what you’re using, and they guarantee as much headroom as you could possibly want.”

Sun Grid gives users straightforward pricing of $1 per CPU, per hour, and $1 per gigabyte, per month. But analysts note that questions linger around logistical issues, such as the method for prioritizing jobs. Sun executives say that the Nauticus N2000 content switch Sun acquired in September 2002 will be used for workload balancing and scheduling.

Analysts speculate that workload priority will depend on the type of service-level agreements a customer works out with Sun and say that, as a result, it will be important for customers to carefully negotiate these contracts as they start to adopt grid computing.

At least initially, the grid is aimed at supporting non-transactional workloads such as geophysical simulations and Monte Carlo simulations within financial institutions. Sun executives say Sun Grid offerings for desktop and development will follow.

“This is not about taking your SAP stack and sticking it on the grid,” says Anil Gadre, Sun’s chief marketing officer. “This is about - I would call it the Model T of computing utilities, which is: bring your own bits, bring your own data set, send them out like laundry and it comes back computed.”

HP and IBM also offer pay-as-you-go services, and analysts say IBM’s supercomputing-on-demand, which was unveiled about 18 months ago, is the most similar. It also is geared for computation-intensive workloads. David Gelardi, vice president of Deep Computing Capacity on Demand at IBM, says pricing works out to about 50 cents per CPU, per hour. But he adds that customers pay a $5,000 membership fee to have access to one of IBM’s three computing-on-demand centers.

HP, meanwhile, charges customers based on business objectives, says Nick van der Zweep, director, virtualization and utility computing, at HP. DreamWorks, for example, used a utility rendering service from HP for “Shrek 2,” and paid a per-frame cost, rather than per CPU-hour.

Analysts say Sun has formidable competition from HP and IBM in providing a utility computing offering.