Filed in archive SaaS by steve on February 2, 2005

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

Related Entries:

Vodafone's View of Ubiquitous Computing - 17 April 2004
NTT DoCoMo's Vision of Ubiquitous Computing - 19 April 2004
the world of wearable computing - 27 May 2005
Portable Computing to Replace Desktops - 21 March 2007
I think cloud computing is supposed to be mysterious - 29 July 2008

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Permalink: Computing...Off the TAP from SUN

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Vote for Computing...Off the TAP from SUN:

Currently 6.67/10
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Rating: 6.67 out of 3 vote(s) cast.

Response from: Simon (02/06/05 11:56am)

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.

Response from: Mark Trawn (09/29/05 1:50am)

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.