I recently came across this analysis from Thom Hickey, with whom I have absolutely no relationship: so his analysis is totally his own, [but I have taken the liberty to restructure]

So, let's take some of Thom's #'s:

Now this doesn't look that high (though I'd suggest that these economics are akin to measuring the cost to produce energy using a home generator vs. an efficient commercial gas turbine), but when we really dig into how he is using his Grid, we can begin to see the real benefit of utility business model:

which isn't an efficient use of capital by any measure.

As Thom states: “Even if you throw in the occasional run-away process that burns up cpu time for a weekend, out-of-pocket costs should be under $30,000/year.”

In fact, even at 4x the apparent /cpu-hr cost, to do testing, having error prone jobs, and even scaling up the jobs, we're still well under 50% of the cost of maintaining your own cluster.

Furthermore, we still haven't looked at the networking costs, the job management/operational costs and other burdens. Sun Grid, for example has an Infiniband option which provides a 4xIB non-blocking fabric. For those of you who haven't been watching Infiniband, it is quite different than the bussed fabric's like Ethernet and has performance that increases as nodes are added vs. the reverse for Ethernet. This provides a very interesting extra-chassis backplane-like technology and is roughly 1/2 the cost of a 10GbE equivalent (per port cost). Ask other competitors how their grids are architected, I'll be that you'll see that not only is our business model unique, but so is our architecture.

A: it's not that SunGrid is necessarily cheaper, pre-se, but that multi-tenancy and sharing expenses can make Sun's $1/cpu-hr a bargain; depending on your utilization. The value is only further bolstered by a substantial investment in high performance infrastructure like the IB network.

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