So when we announced our $1/cpu/hour pricing for our N1 Grid (as opposed to the ever so slightly different ones everyone seems to be building), we knew we'd strike a chord. Why build and operate what Sun could deliver as a web service? Priced by the drink, no less.
So we're now engaged with a growing population of companies to talk about leveraging an "on demand grid" for their workloads. We're also engaged with a number of CIO's who've asked their teams to benchmark their internal compute grids against $1/cpu/hr. All in, all up, at least there's now a benchmark. If they buy from us, they can simply turn the bill over to their internal clients.
And if nothing else, we've now put a stake in the ground. If you're paying more than $1/cpu/hour, odds are you're overpaying (and possibly overbuilding - another customer told me utilization in their xSeries blade farm was below 10%!).
That's hardly the only issue. If I have a complex set of calculations to offload, then I rather suspect that performance issues are one of the things I need to worry about (on Wall Street, I happen to know that this is the case). In that event, a web services accessible grid may not cut it - the network is still a whole lot slower than the local cpu. It all depends on the job and bandwidth of course - the faster the network connection gets, the more easily possible this may be - it may turn out that Sun and Schwartz are actually on to something with this idea. We'll see how it turns out.
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