Sun's Grid Stumble
Posted on: Thursday, 16 June 2005, 03:00 CDT
PLATFORMS
Public launch of utility service pushed back to July
SUN MICROSYSTEMS HAS delayed the rollout of Sun Grid, an Internet- based "utility" service that has been in development since late last year. A lack of computing resources has pushed back the public launch of Sun Grid, originally slated for early 2005, to as late as July, Sun said.
An early access version of Sun Grid is currently available to certain Sun customers, but some recent large-scale grid deployments have forced Sun to divert systems that were to be used for the public site, said Aisling MacRunnels, senior director of utility computing at Sun.
"We can't open that up until we have a substantial number of CPUs behind it," MacRunnels said 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 didn't name any Sun Grid customers, but said some will be announced within a month.
When it launches, 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.
According to analysts, Sun has lagged behind rivals Hewlett- Packard and IBM in delivering utility services, which allow customers to connect to remotely managed servers and pay only for the computing resources they use. The publicly available Sun Grid is different from HP's or IBM's utility products, however, which are typically customized offerings built for large companies.
Shrinking revenue has forced Sun to make workforce reductions during the past few years, said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata.
"Sun is short-staffed right now and short-resourced," Eunice said. "They're trying to fix their engagement model and their basic value proposition to the world. They're short-handed in terms of cycles to get this done."
Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
Copyright Infoworld Media Group May 9, 2005
Source: InfoWorld
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