Sun starts pay-as-you-go supercomputing
Published: 21 Sep 2004 07:45 BST
Sun Microsystems plans to announce a plan on Tuesday to let customers rent supercomputing power from the company's data centers, paying for exactly as much muscle as they need.
The programme, called the Secure N1 Grid, will cost $1 (55p) per processor per hour to use, President Jonathan Schwarz is expected to announce at a New York event designed to curry favour among Wall Street customers. Sun also plans to announce new midrange storage systems, two mid-range Unix servers based on the company's UltraSparc IV processor and new networking gear to improve secure Web site performance.
The event is the third quarterly announcement this year from the Santa Clara, California-based server and software company. Those awaiting the upcoming version 10 release of the Solaris operating system -- and the specific open-source licensing terms under which Sun will share it -- will have to wait for the fourth quarterly announcement toward the end of the year.
Although IBM and Hewlett-Packard offer competing rent-a-supercomputer programmes, Sun is trying to make itself stand out with a pricing strategy it argues is different and very competitive. New pricing plans are Schwartz's hallmark: Since he became Sun's new No. 2 in April, he's been working to revamp Sun's marketing as well as its technology.
"Sun does well when they get to rewrite the rules of the game," Sageza Group analyst Clay Rider said. But when it comes to novel pricing plans, it takes years to change customers' buying behavior.
Schwartz is moving to make Sun's products available in three ways: the standard one-time sales method that is prominent today; subscriptions that bundle products and services; and utility plans for which payments increase or decrease according to the consumption of computing resources.
Also on Tuesday, Sun will sell access to its new StorEdge 6920 storage system with utility pricing. As with its top-end 9900 series line in a programme launched in June, Sun will own, install, maintain and operate the systems according to the consumption of "Sun power units -- a measurement of storage capacity and features such as data protection. The 6920 utility prices will be about half that of the higher-end systems, said Chris Wood, chief technologist of Sun's data management group.
Sun's grid programme offers servers using Sun's UltraSparc processor or AMD's Opteron processor, said Terry Erdle, vice president of marketing for Sun's worldwide services and solutions group. Customers can rent a "grid" of interconnected computers that can be used for calculation tasks such as computing financial risks, searching seismic data that can locate oil fields or detailing frames in animated movies.
Sun is not first with the idea of renting out supercomputer power, a service often geared for customers that have surging processing needs. IBM launched its programme more than a year and half ago with oil and gas customers, expanding later to biology and genetics research. And HP this year began renting computing brawn to entertainment industry customers.
Sun's current service is for customers that require little in the way of hand-holding, Erdle said. It plans to launch another service, called Sun Utility Computing for Grid, that will cost more but provide more elaborate services from Sun and partners with expertise in particular fields. Partners will include CGI Group, Atos Origin and EDS, Erdle said.
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