Sun introduces service

This weekend, Sun Microsystems will officially launch a computer rental service at a price of 1USD / 1 processor / hour of use.

Information about this event was officially confirmed by Sun president Jonathan Schwartz on his blog.

The service initially provides limited access to customers in the US market and expects the capacity of the rental computer system to be more limited than what Sun has promised.

'Grid computing' is a model that allows companies to use a large number of computer resources on demand no matter where they are.

'Grid computing' uses resources from separate computers connected together into a network - often the Internet here - to solve major computing requirements. This model was first launched by the SETI @ home project in 1990. Later many other companies followed SETI @ home's step in providing this type of service.

Sun officially introduced grid computing in February 2005. Sun's service is designed to provide businesses with access to huge computing resources similar to those they buy. The goal of Sun's new service is to target tasks that require deep electronic calculations such as dynamic multi-dimensional animated graphic rendering or analysis of financial models.

Sun decided to delay the time of service provision because there were so many customers registering to surpass the system's capacity, making Sun no longer have room to provide services for a fee.

But according to Gordon Haff - Illuminata analyst - Sun decided to delay the time to provide services because it needed more time to study security issues as well as solutions. For example, the service needs to have the necessary changes to avoid being used to send spam or denial of service attacks.

In the blog post, President Schwartz said the delay in providing the new service was due to businesses not having confidence in its 'grid computer' system. Customers still prefer to use traditional 'outsourcing' models rather than new services.

Moreover, building a 'grid computer' system is much more complicated than Sun's first thoughts, Schwartz chairman emphasized. Most 'grid computer' projects today are built for specific applications such as data analysis, online search engines or video image rendering. Meanwhile Sun's system went in a different direction.

Another reason Sun's delay in providing this service is legal. Specifically, here are the export control regulations of the US government for some technologies.

When Sun's service is officially launched, customers can register and use it through the network.com website.