Sun Microsystems is putting the business of Wall
Street in its new enterprise grid.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company announced Thursday that it plans
to launch a new technology exchange service with Archipelago Holdings that will allow Sun Grid customers
to buy and sell their server compute cycles.
Similar to a trading floor, customers will be able to bid on CPU usage cycles, and
companies can access an unlimited number of CPUs as they need them.
The announcement comes on the back of Sun’s new pay-per-use utility offerings,
which include the Sun Grid compute utility at $1 per CPU, per hour
($1/cpu-hr); and the Sun Grid storage utility at $1
per gigabyte per month ($1/GB-mo).
The open, all-electronic stock exchange
uses Archipelago Exchange (ArcaEx), Archipelago Holdings’ electronic matching technology. ArcaEx trades
Nasdaq-listed equity securities and exchange-listed equity securities,
including those traded on the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock
Exchange and Pacific Exchange.
“The technological underpinnings of the Archipelago Exchange could be
customized to trade nearly anything, and as the demand for computing
power increases, we see great potential in building an exchange for
trading CPU usage cycles,” Steve Rubinow, Archipelago Exchange CTO, said
in a statement.
The concept of buying and trading compute cycles has been around since before mainframes were invented, when engineers would barter for
number-crunching time on a network. Only recently, with the advent of
enterprise grid technology, have companies like Sun, IBM , HP
and others begun to tap into the
commercial aspects of grid technologies.
For example, HP’s grid-for-barter plan is called Tycoon.
The framework sits above the application layer and augments HP’s
adaptive enterprise strategy with a combination of service-oriented
architectures
create a so-called “implementation agnostic” configuration.
IBM, which has three grid centers in New York, Houston and France,
has started offering a commercial grid program that undercuts Sun’s
prices by half. However, Big Blue has not stated any plans to offer an
exchange service where customers can buy or trade their compute cycles or
storage.
“The concept of compute exchanges, much like the idea of a widely
available, massively scalable computing grid, creates and raises new and
potentially very disruptive questions for IT executives at enterprises
of all types,” Michael Dortch, a principal analyst with IT research firm
Robert Frances Group, told internetnews.com.
“The ability to acquire compute cycles economically as they are needed is incredibly
compelling. However, questions about how requests for those cycles will
be prioritized, and whether or not priorities will be governed by
service agreements, auctions or other mechanisms are just the beginning
for interested IT decision-makers,” he added. “The fact that these questions are
being raised is good for all concerned, but actual, specific business
benefits will have to wait until at least some of these questions are
asked — and answered — by Sun, its partners and at least some of its
competitors.”
In the coming months, Sun said it will also roll out related Sun Grid
products for the desktop and developer communities.
