Stuart Wells, VP of Strategic Development and Sun Financing, shares his insights on how the Sun grid and utility computing will change the business of buying and using computer assets.
Sun’s Pay-per-use model
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Same story for the last three or four years. AT&T thought grid computing would be important too, but the idea didn’t go very far.
Hey, timesharing is cool again!
It’s not that this grid computing could not be useful but when you read something like this (below) you just can’t stop thinking this guy is trying to fool you :
Q: What does the “democratization of network computing” mean?
A: Simply speaking, all democratization means in this context is that, by offering this retail emphasis on the pricing of computing, you make the same level of computing available to everyone. In other words, if you’re a small business, you don’t need to feel disadvantaged against big businesses because you don’t have access to the same computing infrastructure that they do. You have the access, you just pay for it differently.
Uh? What does he mean? You always get access to better technologies IF you can pay it. So isn’t that like stating: “small business can get access to big players hardware and software… they just need to go and buy it…”? Clever!
They could sell things better if they weren’t trying to make you feel stupid…
This makes me think of the DVD-DivX scheme that Circuit City and a handful of DVD player OEMs pushed a few years back. Pay-to-play, as it were.
The initial cost was cheap (a DivX DVD was about $3-$4), but you could only play it for so long before you had to pay, again. Sure, you could unlock the disc, but it would only play on that player.
Again, it was all part of locking the customer in. Fortunately, not many people fell for it and it quietly disappeared…
I’d rather stick with commodity hardware and commodity/open-source software (think *BSD/Linux) and not worry about being trapped by any one vendor. “Power Without The Price”, as Atari once said.
Uh? What does he mean? You always get access to better technologies IF you can pay it. So isn’t that like stating: “small business can get access to big players hardware and software… they just need to go and buy it…”? Clever!
No, it means now they can just go and RENT IT. I can either use a sledge hammer to break up my old driveway, or go over to Hanks U-Rent-It and rent a jack hammer, or a small tractor with a jack hammer. Hell, I can rent the tractor, trailer, jack hammer and dump truck for the entire job — Just Like The Big Guys. Jack hammer my driveway into rubble, use the tractor to load it in the dump truck, and drive it to the landfill. Why should I have to buy that if I’m only going to use it for a day?
General Motors no doubt has a vast array of hardware to run big simulations on. But that hardware, the infrastructure it relies upon, the maintenance, upkeep, etc. all cost $$$. GM may well use the hardware enough to justify the $$$ for the system.
Now, you have Bob from Small Engineering Inc. who may design and test simulations on some small machines, but doesn’t have the $$$ to setup an equivalent CPU farm that GM has, yet you may well want to run his simulation in something less than 3 weeks that it would take to run on the hardware he has.
So, ideally, Bob can call Sun, say “I need 2000 CPU hours on a boat load of machines”. Sun says “$2000 sir”, Bob forks over the 2 grand, allots 21 4 CPU machines, and in a day his simulation is done, and he gets his result.
GM can afford the large capital investment required up front to lower its overall CPU/hr costs to run their internal simulations day in and day out. But before a system like what Sun is doing became available, Bob was basically SOL. Even if he had the $2000 to run the job, to run it himself, for the one day, would cost vastly more, thus making the simulation run for Bob effectively impossible.
Now, Bob isn’t SOL, now Bob has an option. Now a small 3D movie producer can perhaps leverage Suns grid without having to become Pixar to get his movie rendered before he’s dead.
Many companies have to scale their internal systems to meet PEAK load, not necessarily ROUTINE load. Say your release cycle is every quarter, and the last 3 weeks of the quarter your machines are used at 100%, but the rest of the time, they’re only at 50%. So, you have to have twice the hardware for only 3 months of the year.
If it fits in to your model, you can offload your peak usage on to a system like Suns, and potentially save money. Because now your machine room is half the size it needs to be, your cooling and power is half the size, and your admin staff for these machines is half the size, plus the cost of the machines themselves.
There are a lot of scenarios where leveraging something like what Sun is offering can make sense. There’s a lot where it doesn’t. Now it’s a matter to see if there is enough of a market for Sun to make a good go at it.
Thank you, Will. I was afraid my idea of what grid computing was was totally wrong based on some of the replies.
At work I am in charge of analyzing some data that’s been collected, and running the software on my 3.0 ghz Pentium 4 would take at least a month. Using a university’s cluster (the non-profit organization I work for is associated with the university) it can be done in about 14 hours. In a week or two we’ll be analyzing even more data.
If we hadn’t had access to a university cluster for free, our next free option was about 14 old 500 mhz desktop systems. Only we would have been in charge of installing the OS, installing the software, and finding space for all of them to sit and run for a few weeks. If there were any hardware problems, I personally would have had to deal with it. It would have been a lot more painful that way.
I’m assuming most small businesses don’t have free access to 100-node compute clusters or a 16-way POWER4 machine whose only purpose is to be available for running user programs. Sun’s grid system might not have a large market, but I can imagine some companies are loving it.
And I really have no idea how it could contribute to vendor lock-in. As long as your program is POSIX compliant and the system supports MPI, you’re a long way to being able to use any cluster anywhere. I can’t think of any significant functional difference of Sun’s cluster running Solaris on Sparcs and Opterons compared to a Linux cluster on Opterons or Pentiums, and if I were a business, I wouldn’t care. I’d just be looking at price.
Once again we have teenage kids who have no idea regarding how real world business works naysaying stuff. We run aircraft crash simulations and usually takes several days on stock hardware. Access to something like the Sun Grid would save us so many man hours without actually buying expensive hardware which would be utilised to its maximum potential ONCE every six months.
Solaris is Open now so all the people whining about how they love open source can relax and accept the fact that this is actually a boon for people who need access to massive computing power for short periods.
He said it so well, good job pal!
Thank you
and now all you teenagers out there whining about how cool *nix is, go back and do your homework, this is none of your business.
Regards,
jay