Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Last week I had the chance to catch up with Jim P., VP of Engineering for Sun Grid and hear what he has planned for Sun Grid 2.0 (my name, not his). Unless case you are totally new to Sun, you know Sun Grid as our $1/CPU hour compute utility. Jim is getting ready to roll out version 2.0 of the Sun Grid infrastructure and shared with me some of his plans. First of all, the hardware infrastructure is being upgraded to our new Sun Blade 8000 modular computing system. Jim really likes the Sun Blade 8000 as he can lay out his data center power, cooling, and network cabling once and be ensured that he doesn't have to touch a single cable for many years, since the Sun Blade 8000 CPU blades are upgradeable completely independent of the rest of the blade chassis including I/O, networking, and power. And since AMD is sticking with their 95 watt/socket power envelope out to next CY's quad core processors, the data center power and cooling doesn't have to be upgraded anytime soon either.

Arguably, Jim's new Sun Grid infrastructure is one of the most complete HPC/Grid infrastructures developed at Sun (a bit of a healthy competitive challenge to my own HPC team :). Jim's infrastructure goes way beyond what we deliver in most customer engagements, from integrated authentication, authorization, and security to best of breed software provisioning using Sun, 3rd party, and open source tool to remote management using Sun Managed Services. Jim demonstrated to me how he can sit in his office in Menlo Park, California, push a button, and nearly instantly load a new OS and application suite on several hundred or several thousand servers half way around the world in London. Very comforting, especially for those of us who want to shave or brush our teeth these days. In fact, I was so impressed with the new Sun Grid infrastructure that Jim and I started to kick around some ideas on how we could expand its usage.

Most of you (at least in the US) know Sun Grid as the public $1/hour CPU grid available at the http://network.com site we acquired when we purchased StorageTek. Of course, thanks to US Government regulations, public grid is only available in the U.S. Seems that it is too difficult to tell the difference between Sun Grid and an F16 fighter jet so we just toss them both into the same export control category. OK, enough editorializing. We actually have hosted grids outside the US, using the same infrastructure as our public grid, only you can't pay with PayPal but have to sign a paper contract so we can ensure you are not planning to either build or blow up F16's using our grid. But as Jim and I exchanged notes, we realized that we had each talked to dozens of customers that were more than interested in purchasing their own copies of Sun Grid, lock, stock, and barrel, for their own internal use. I guess some CIO's are getting tired of listening to their IT staff make yet another excuse on why they don't yet have a globally accessible, web portal based, internal compute utility that can be shared across the corporation using open standards, with the same authentication and single sign on used by every employee on everything from their cell phone to their desktop (well, I guess a lot of companies don't even have that, but our software practice has some solutions there too if you need them).

It is an interesting idea, and Jim and I agreed to have some follow on discussions. Personally, I think $1/CPU/hour is the way to go, but I lease my cars too, and recognize that car leases and $1/CPU/hour isn't right for everyone. So stay tuned. Today you start using Sun Blade 8000's with our Sun Refresh Service and never have to worry about buying another CPU, maybe soon we will just bundle up the entire Sun Grid Compute Utility and let you buy that as a refresh service.