Sun stumbles with grid rollout

SAN FRANCISCO - Sun has delayed the rollout of its Sun Grid , an Internet-based utility service that has been under development since late last year.

A lack of computing resources has pushed back the public launch of Sun Grid, originally slated to go live in the first few months of 2005, to as late as July, Sun executives say.

An early access version of Sun Grid is available to certain Sun customers, but a number of recent large-scale grid deployments have forced Sun to divert systems that were to be used for the public site, says Aisling MacRunnels, senior director of utility computing with Sun.

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SAN FRANCISCO - Sun has delayed the rollout of its Sun Grid , an Internet-based utility service that has been under development since late last year.

A lack of computing resources has pushed back the public launch of Sun Grid, originally slated to go live in the first few months of 2005, to as late as July, Sun executives say.

An early access version of Sun Grid is available to certain Sun customers, but a number of recent large-scale grid deployments have forced Sun to divert systems that were to be used for the public site, says Aisling MacRunnels, senior director of utility computing with Sun.

"We can't open that up until we have a substantial number of CPUs behind it," she says of the Sun Grid Web site. "All of those CPUs that we thought were going to be [used] are being reallocated to a very large number of banks."

MacRunnels declined to provide the names of any Sun Grid customers, but says that the first such announcements would be made within 30 days.

Just like power and water

When it becomes publicly available, Sun Grid is expected to operate like a power or water utility. It will deliver raw computing and storage capacity at the flat rate of $1 per CPU, per hour, and $1 per gigabyte, per month. Sun Grid resources are even expected to be traded as a commodity on the Archipelago Holdings electronic exchange, the company has said.

Three regional centers, based in Virginia, New Jersey and London, have been set up to power the Grid, and the company is working on more than 30 proof-of-concept projects with companies in the financial services, petroleum and entertainment industries.

Sun had hoped to operate six regional centers at this point, but technical and logistical issues have prevented this from happening, MacRunnels says.

According to analysts, the Santa Clara computer maker has lagged behind rivals HP and IBM in delivering utility-type services such as Sun Grid, which lets customers connect to remotely managed servers and pay only for the resources that they use. But the publicly available Sun Grid has been promoted as something quite different from HP or IBM's utility products, which are normally customized offerings built for large companies.

Legal issues

Sun also still is hammering out a number of legal and business-related issues as it tries to make Sun Grid available to all, says Dan Hushon, chief technologist of strategic development. "This really comes down to what is the market willing to buy," he says. "The last thing we want to do is put something out there that nobody wanted to buy."

To add to Sun Grid's woes, the executive overseeing the project resigned two weeks ago. Robert Youngjohns, who was executive vice president of Sun's strategic development financing group, left to take a job as president and CEO of San Jose company Callidus Software. Sun's former vice president of Wall Street Technologies, Stuart Wells, replaced Youngjohns.

McMillan is a correspondent with the IDG News Service.

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