Sun adds Grid to N1 name
Published: 13 Feb 2004 12:25 GMT
Sun Microsystems is considering a new payment system for its utility-computing software, charging customers according to how many devices they have.
In addition, the server maker has changed the name of its utility-computing software from N1 to N1 Grid, executives said on Wednesday. The renaming reflects Sun's plan to hasten the expansion of N1 from its current incarnation as sophisticated management software into a key part of a grander vision, in which many companies share computing power.
In a talk at Sun's analyst conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, the company's top software executive, Jonathan Schwartz, said Sun is considering a payment mechanism in which businesses would pay a fixed amount of money per year and per computing device to get access to the full suite of N1 software. He didn't specify whether the payment plan would be based on a company's entire collection of computing gear or just on the subset N1 software manages.
"We learned a lot from launching the Java Enterprise System," or JES, Schwartz said of Sun's server software, for which the company charges $100 (£52.87) per employee per year. He said customers now demand predictable annual costs.
Charging per box would mean that a company has to keep track of how many boxes it has, Schwartz said -- not just of servers but also of storage systems, network routers, encryption accelerators, load balancers and other gear.
Sun's N1 Grid competes chiefly with IBM's on-demand technology and Hewlett-Packard's Adaptive Enterprise. All three companies have been acquiring multiple start-ups to flesh out their technology as fast as possible. Other competitors include Veritas, Microsoft and Computer Associates.
In the utility-computing vision, hardware adjusts automatically so that computing tasks are accomplished within established time limits. Meeting those "service-level agreements" requires a computing infrastructure much more flexible than usual so that hardware can be quickly reconfigured to meet changing business needs. That flexibility, in turn, leads to a future in which it's possible for companies to rent computing power from others.
In this ultimate vision, computing power could be purchased the way utilities such as electricity and water are today.
Schwartz said he recently asked a Wall Street executive if he would be willing to sell his spare computing capacity on weekends, when demand was slow. The answer: yes, as long as security barriers were strong enough to ensure that outsiders couldn't gain unauthorised access.
Schwartz didn't indicate how much Sun was considering charging per box, per year, for N1 Grid. It's likely that as with JES, the company will try to use the pricing to pressure its competitors.
IBM's Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator has a starting price of $20,000 and costs more when more servers are managed.
Sun currently charges for some N1 Grid software on a per-server basis. For example, its N1 Grid Service Provisioning -- the software it acquired from CentreRun in 2003 -- costs $1,800 to $2,500 per server, said Yael Zheng, director of N1 Grid marketing, but Sun will begin a $1,000-per-server promotion when it starts selling its new UltraSparc IV-based servers in March.
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