RSSComputing…Off the TAP from SUN
For those who dont follow Jonathan Schwartz's, – SUN Microsystems COO's, blog, His post this week is on the subject(his present favourite) of "commodity business – computing",
In this weeks post he explicitly states that computing (& bandwidth) are commodities, and makes clear that computers are not, He draws parallel to the electricity domain, as he has often done in the past – - Analogy used electricity is a commodity, generators arent.
And looks like SUN is taking the first public/celebrated (IBM has been active in this space) step in making computing available as a commodity….Off the TAP.
SUN on Monday announced plans to offer remote computing resources to business customers, allowing them to purchase computing time over a network. This basically is similar to how we buy electricity / water through wires & pipes.
As indicated by Schwartz, one feature of a commodity is that it is available at a standard prize/quantity, well sun does this to computing they are saying it will cost clients $1 an hour or each micro processor used.
Well SUN is not restricted itself to COMPUTING, it is also providing storage at $1 a month for a gig of storage. MIND BLOWING! – i think i will go get my self an hour of computing & gig of storage…we will need to change our mindset now!!!..dont we?What does this do for customers?…What is the BugList* that this helps address?
- Avoid over paying and possibly over building …are there servers in your farm which have below 10-20% utilization?
- Companies don't need to set up their own grids, also they can benchmark their grids against the cost of the one offered by SUN.
- A pain point for most CIOs today is the space in the data centre, storage requires a lot of space.
- Another one is two faced the electricity that needs to be provided & the exhaust system for the heat…imagine the things CIO's are having to worry about …
This I am sure is going to be the topic of many future posts….let's watch.
*This if from the book "Art of Innovation — Tom Kelly". As per the book maintaining a bug list is one of the primary steps to being innovative, Jonathan Schwartz seems to be an ace at keeping the list & understanding & communicating it as well.Prashanth Rai
Firstly, I should say that I agree with much of Jonathan Schwartz’s idea of *computing* (as opposed to *computers*) as a commodity.
Whether Sun’s (or anyone else’s) offering is what the market wants, however, remains to be seen. One thing that’s particularly important is the price. If you’re a customer of this type of service, you have a *lot* of computation to do. I don’t think it’s possible to judge whether the $1 per CPU hour price tag (read $8640 per CPU year) is good value or not, without knowing rather more about the offering than is in the Utility Pricing table on Jonathan’s weblog. What I can say right away is that Sun’s offering is not so cheap that it’s a no-brainer for people with large compute tasks to use a service like this.
The $/cpu hour concept is what I just used to get an IBM quote driven into the ground. So whatever Sun’s success may be, they’re helping me a ton by keeping all my other vendors honest.