Lights On But No One Home At Sun Grid 232
cygnusx writes "The Register reveals that Sun's pay-for-use grid computing services hasn't picked up a single customer yet." From the article: "The missing customers prove quite shocking when you consider that utility computing users must agree to be named in marketing programs as part of their contract with Sun - a fact learned by The Register and confirmed by a Sun spokeswoman. More than one year since it first started hyping the 'pay-for-use grid computing services' Sun is still weeks away from presenting a customer to the public. The program has proved much tougher to sell that Sun ever imagined."
Price too high? (Score:5, Informative)
Most of us have friends and family (Score:3, Informative)
IIRC he spent a year or two living frugaly with relatives or friends because he knew he had a great idea and wanted it done as soon as possible.
Sure, he could have used some money, but he wasn't about to get a job and then have the company own his $8.7 million dollar idea (and that's just the current market value not including future potential revenue streams).
Not suprising, just do the math... (Score:5, Informative)
Sun's charge of what, $1/CPU-hour is just way way way out of line compared with what you can build yourself (using dual core, dual processor athlons from Sun, for example), if you have any consistant demand.
Doesn't Jiva do this cheaper and faster (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Most of us have friends and family (Score:5, Informative)
He didn't sit down and said "Hey, I have this great idea for content distribution that I think I can make money from."
He's said this numerous times in various interviews.
It's just "time sharing", and it's obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
Sun's "grid computing" operation seems to be an attempt to find a use for unsold Sun servers, or at least to avoid writing their value down to scrap prices.
f you went to a big hosting company and said you wanted a thousand unlimited-CPU-at-low-priority shared hosting accounts, valid only from 2300 to 0700, you could probably get a really good price. If "grid computing" were useful, somebody would be doing this. All those nearly idle CPUs could be doing something.
There's a successful grid computing company: Akamai [akamai.com]. What they sell is distributed hosting and cacheing, which they call "Akamai On Demand Managed Services". When the web site for the World Cup or NASCAR or Britney is getting millions of hits per hour during some special event, thousands of Akamai servers switch to serving those pages to handle the transient load. That's a successful "grid" application, and it's been working for years.
Akamai does more than serve pages. You can run your business logic, in Java, on their servers. So they're already set up to run user code on their grid. If anybody is going to sell grid computing profitably, it's Akamai. They're all set up to do it. Yet they don't.
Re:Duh.. (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I could pay Sun a million dollars for ~1400 CPUs for a month, or I could spend about a million dollars and get 350 dual-processor dual-core Opterons, use them for a month, and then sell them at pretty close to retail, bringing my costs to way under a million dollars.
Or you can keep them and use them for more projects.
Either way, Sun's solution isn't really cheaper than a company doing it yourself. It's more expensive than buying the hardware yourself and paying some people to set it up. This is why when small companies need to render EFX for a movie, they buy up a lot of hardware, use it to make the movie, and then sell it off again. It's cheaper that way. They did this for Riddick.
Re:Price too high? (Score:3, Informative)
Compare this to buying a 2-way Sun V240 [sun.com] at about $7,245 (pre-discount), and you have $45,315 worth of TCO cost-savings to justify to management over the same 3-year window to make this worthwhile. Now I don't pretend to speak for others, but our SA's administer multiple systems, typically at least 20/SA, so unless your SA's make more than $300k/yr, I can't see this being feasible.
Re:Ha ha (Score:3, Informative)
Say a small (but lucrative) investment firm with cash to spare but not enough to manage an IT project the size they need for the simulations they need about 25000 hours for every 3 months and that would be sitting idle the rest of the time.
Not through lack of interest (Score:1, Informative)
The article seems to be jumping the gun (Score:1, Informative)
Re:It's entirely SUN's own fault (Score:3, Informative)
It's not quite that simple. When you free up resources spent basically reimplementing the same wheel the last decade, you also free up the resources spent by other companies buying that wheel. That means the other companies suddenly have more available resources they can spend on custom software improving their own business. Or they can lower their prices, in the end leading to you getting more value for your paycheck.
In the end, any increase in actual wealth for society as a whole is driven by things getting cheaper to produce. When you eventually approach a zero cost due to the nature of an infinitely reproducible product, you have effectively ended scarcity for that product and there is a permanent increase in wealth for society.
Good for businesses, good for consumers, good for programmers who can move on to new things instead.
Perhaps we'll eventually run out of that many new things to do, but that will mean we've also run out of scarcity. And when there is no scarcity, well, having some more free time would probably do wonders for the average programmers stress levels.