* Sun struggling with grid utility implementation
Sun’s delay of the Sun Grid Utility until July is perhaps due to the company realizing it has bitten off more than it can chew.
Robert McMillan of the IDG News Service wrote a story that details the delays Sun is facing in implementing Sun Grid: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/0503sunstumb.html
Sun points to some of the logistical issues the company has to iron out before it can let customers buy computing and storage resources.
“We can’t open that up until we have a substantial number of CPUs behind it,” says Aisling McRunnels, senior director of utility computing at Sun of the Sun Grid Web site, according to McMillan’s article. “All of those CPUs that we thought were going to be [used] are being reallocated to a very large number of banks.”
In formally announcing the grid utility in February, Sun didn’t elaborate on how it would support the grid, explain what kind of licenses it would have with users or detail its Grid Exchange, which would sell compute power to customers via Archipelago, the third-largest stock exchange.
Neither did the company make clear how users were to buy compute cycles or how they would pay for the compute power they bought. CEO Jonathan Schwartz made it sound as easy as entering an American Express number at a Sun site and obtaining compute cycles. Originally there was a Web site for buying server processing power, but it was soon taken down.
Sun is confusing user’s enthusiasm for anything grid-related with the complexity of actually building a grid infrastructure. When the company prematurely announced the grid last fall, it didn’t anticipate that it would not have enough machines to build out the grid. In February, when Sun announced the configuration of the grid – thousands of Opteron servers linked to Sun StorEdge 6920 storage – it didn’t detail the underlying infrastructure of the grid or how users could get compute cycles or storage capacity.
Sun’s enthusiasm for grids is not much different than HP’s StorageWorks Grid Strategy. HP talked about the grid-ability of its storage devices and plans to make future storage systems “gridable.” It laid out a roadmap that spanned the next six years, but failed to tell users how HP servers could become gridable, too. Since then HP has not introduced any gridable storage other than enhancements to its Reference Information System, an archiving box.
Both plans are long-term and inherently good. The implementation of them is another matter.
