Industry giants begin offering utility pricing for commercial
grids
Sun has begun offering a utility computing service with processing
facilities charged at $1 per-CPU per hour, and storage priced at $1
per gigabyte per month.
Facilities have been established in London, Texas, Virginia and New
Jersey. Sun said that a number of global companies are running
pilot programmes.
Separately, Sun is also in discussions with electronic stock
exchange group Archipelago Holdings to create the world's first
market for selling blocks of computing power to corporate users in
a similar way to how stocks and shares are sold.
The demand is likely to come from organisations that want to carry
out, for example, large-scale financial analyses or geophysical
modelling.
Sun said it is being "extremely transparent" about the $1 per
CPU/hour pricing for its Compute Utility processing service, and
that it offers a complete software stack with no licensing fees.
This includes the infrastructure, power, Solaris 10 operating
system, staff support, network management and storage.
Robert Youngjohns, executive vice-president, strategic development
and Sun financing, said, "Our customers think they spend anywhere
from $6 to $16 an hour, which is as much as one tenth of standard
computing costs. This is going to change the way IT is bought and
managed."
The concept of grid computing is attractive as it allows users to
pay for only as much computational power as they need to complete a
given task.
Analysts question whether software licences will be valid on
commercial grids, because they tend to require the user to state
the number of processors the software is running on. There are also
practical difficulties with shifting large amounts of data between
the user organisation and the grid facilities.
Gary Barnett, research director at analyst firm Ovum, said
licensing complications will pose a problem for firms interested in
adopting utility computing.
"You can only run software on a grid if it is capable of running on
a grid. Very few big commercial software suppliers are able or
willing to license software on a per use basis. There are no
commercial applications that can be run across so many processors,"
said Barnett.
He suggested that grid suppliers such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and
Sun might be able to arrange special deals with software suppliers,
for example, buying a million licences and promising to allocate
them on an on-demand basis.
Barnet did not consider Sun's pricing to be particularly cheap,
"One dollar per CPU per hour is not cheap. In reality, users are
not going to pay a great deal less for their software, and
suppliers certainly will not settle for less money."
IBM is also offering a grid computing service, Deep Capacity
Computing On Demand, which starts at about 47 to 50 cents per CPU
per hour, although Sun has queried what is actually included in
that service.
Barnett pointed out further hurdles with the computing-on-tap
model. "How do you make your organisation's infrastructure ready to
plug into such a network?" he said.
"Also, I am sure that for financial organisations, the Financial
Services Authority would be very interested to learn if a firm was
sending customer data over the network. This will have data
protection and security implications."
What is the grid?
Grid computing (or the use of a computational grid) is applying the
resources of many computers in a network to a single problem at the
same time.
Grid computing requires the use of software that can divide and
farm out pieces of a program to as many as several thousand
computers. Grid computing can be thought of as distributed and
large-scale cluster computing and as a form of network-distributed
parallel processing. One likely area for the use of grid computing
will be pervasive computing applications.
A well-known example of grid computing is the ongoing Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) project, in which thousands of
people share unused processor cycles of their PCs in the search for
signs from outer space.
Firms unite to push open source grid
IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Nortel Networks recently joined
together to promote open source-based systems for grid
computing.
The four have joined the Globus Consortium, which is promoting the
use of the Globus Toolkit, an open source platform initially
developed by fellow consortium member Univa. Univa is particularly
active in the education market, but is also pushing its toolkit in
the commercial sector.
With the help of the four companies in the consortium, open source
grid activity in the commercial sector should be given a major
boost.
Oracle, a keen advocate of grid computing, co-founded the
Enterprise Grid Alliance. But the Globus Consortium, unlike its
Oracle-led alternative, focuses on open source grid
solutions.
Gary Barnett, research director at analyst firm Ovum, said, "For
the next two years at least, most potential utility computing users
are wrestling with the task of becoming utility ready, and it will
be a long time before the notion of compute exchanges becomes
anything more than a niche.
"Sun is wrong to suggest that the notion of a market for computing
resources is a new way of thinking about utility computing. Every
supporter of utility computing has talked about a free market in
computer resources as the logical ultimate destination for utility
computing."