Sun forced to delay retail grid rollout

Sun Microsystems has been forced to rein in the general availability of its retail grid service.

The Sun Grid retail website was originally slated to launch early this year, but Aisling MacRunnels, senior director of utility computing at Sun, told vnunet.com that it has been pushed back to later this summer.

The company needed to divert computing capacity earmarked for the retail service to some of its wholesale grid customers.

"We had to reprioritise things because some very large banking customers needed capacity," said MacRunnels. "We got way better response than we anticipated."

Sun is still to announce any customers for its grid service, but plans to do so "within weeks". The service has been running for about three months.

Michael Dortch, principal analyst with the Robert Frances Group, told vnunet.com that the delay will not be a problem for organisations waiting to use the service.

He suggested that a brief delay is better than coming to market on time with a product that is not ready.

Dortch was not surprised by the lack of customer endorsements. "There are a lot of enterprises out there that aren't talking about this stuff because they are busy trying to do it," he said.

The Sun Grid rents out one hour of CPU time for $1. The service has a retail side where clients can purchase credits and submit computing tasks through a website, and a wholesale side for large clients such as banks and research institutes that frequently need to run lengthy analysis and simulations.

Sun took the wholesale side of the business live last February and has provided access to the retail service to a select number of customers as a trial.

Gordon Haff, senior analyst at Illuminata, had accused Sun of over-hyping the grid technology. Although he still believes that the number of applications that it enables is limited, he also believes that the Sun Grid offers a way for organisations to standardise on their IT infrastructure.

"There is enormous amount of reinventing the wheel that goes on in corporate data centres," he told vnunet.com.

In addition to the lack of capacity, Sun also needed additional time to overcome issues around liabilities and misuse, according to the analyst, such as ensuring that users do not utilize the Sun Grid to launch a denial of service attack or to send spam email.

Sun also needs to pay attention to details such as the user interface for its retail site, according to Haff. "A lot of people wouldn't give it a second chance," he said.