Sun Ready to Light Public Grid

Sun Microsystems’ pay-per-use grid initiative is in use commercially and has ”thousands of customers” waiting in the wings for a public launch.

A recent media report alleged that Sun’s pay-per-use $1 per CPU hour initiative, which will launch during the next few weeks according to a company spokeswoman, had yet to log a single customer.

But Sun has a somewhat different view of the success of its initiative, which it first announced in September 2004.

At the company’s Network Computing ’05 (NC05Q1) event in February, it revealed further details of the plan, which involves massive computing power on Opteron processor-based Sun Fire servers running Solaris 10.

Aisling MacRunnels, senior director of utility computing at Sun, explained that in February, the company clarified where it was going to go and put out a definition of what the industry should aspire to.

”We are committed to that definition and have launched the pay-per-use utility over that time and have customers,” MacRunnels told internetnews.com. ”We are now getting ready to open the doors on this to the public.”

After Sun’s announcement, the company garnered interest from oil and gas financial companies that had an immediate need. MacRunnels explained that in order to meet that need, Sun developed a commercial compute utility that is a $1 per-CPU per-hour with companies committing to volume contracts.

”These customers tend to want full use of those CPUs and are not dialing up and down within minutes, getting on and off the way the other [public] utility is envisioned,” MacRunnels said. ”Those are mainstream corporate customers and we have them today. We made good on the promise, and it is available now.”

This article was first published on internetnews.com. To read the full article, click here.

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