Jonathan Schwartz,President & COO, Sun announces a new compute utility - taking N1 to its next logical step, to a secure N1 Grid service, available on demand, to any customer with a credit card, or a purchase order. In increments of an hour. A virtual compute ranch - virtual because you don't employ the people, or operate the technology that manages it. A grid that let's your network do the walking. Jonathan explains,We'll provision cpu's by the hour running Solaris Containers. In Siberia, for all I care (to keep cooling/real estate costs low - no offense to our friends in Siberia). And we'll tell our customers - if you have comptutational workloads, that require 10's or 100's or 1,000's of cpu's, for defined periods of time (ie, 5 hours, or 3 days or 3 months) - discrete jobs like rendering a movie, or doing a monte carlo or geophysical simulation, or modeling a protein - then we can run your loads on demand for less than anyone in the industry. What Google, eBay and Salesforce.com are proving are the economics of using someone else's uniformly standardized infrastructure to run your business. Sun's business, historically, has been the opposite - we deliver infrastructure to customers who work with us to customize that infrastructure to unique workloads. What salesforce.com and others prove is that there are some workloads for which the reverse can be true - mapping the workload, like salesforce automation, to a singular service provider with a common infrastructure, yields savings from economies of scale that vastly outweigh any potential expense in changing workflows/workloads. The ASP (application service provider) model is, in fact, a great model. Ultimately, business, would be in a position to sell trusted containers, raw compute power, "back to the grid" when your exchange is closed, your employees have gone home, or your machines aren't in use.One man's virtualization is another man's web service. The era of mapping workloads to network service infrastructure is officially underway. This may turn out to be something like Price per cpu/hour? Truly significant, if this can scale up and made widely available - I see this also opening a new service market for intermediation and billing - like in telecom- further add roaming, cross subscription etc.. possibilities ad infinitum...indeed exciting. |
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