Sun's announcement marks the information technology industry's latest step toward "utility computing, " a grid system in which companies pipe in data processing and storage from faraway server farms, says Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, a book on utility computing published earlier this week.
Founded in 2004, 3Tera was in many ways the first commercial utility computing platform.
But for now, those larger companies are treating utility computing services as side projects or experiments.
It???s refreshingly savvy about the latest tech trends: Ajax, open APIs, utility computing, IP networks.
However, the concept of utility computing multiple companies sharing a common pool of standardized computing resources never really took off.
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As computing becomes a utility type service, cloud providers will be extensively more capable than any local staff.
"Sun specializes in high-end gear, and somebody has to supply the computers that power this utility computing, " says Carr.
When Jeff Bezos launched the service in 2002, there were other more-established players in what was then called utility computing.
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The company's "arms dealer" strategy, he says, will allow it to profit no matter who eventually comes to dominate utility computing.
"Utility computing is one of those disruptive technologies that larger players won't be interested in until it gets big, " says Carr.
The dream of utility computing feels a little bit the same way.
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Hardware is evolving rapidly into dynamic blocks of utility computing (and storage and networking) that can be standardized, widely deployed, and efficiently utilized.
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Instead of investing in expensive IT infrastructure, companies will take advantage of computing as a utility, paying their IT bills the same way they pay for water and electricity.
The first wave of utility computing customers, Carr says, will be small companies trying to avoid big IT investments, whose computing needs can be easily served by smaller firms.
Major software companies, including Oracle, IBM, Google and even Amazon.com, are all beginning to offer their own forms of utility computing applications, such as software-as-a-service and rented storage and processing power.
But he's confident that by the time larger customers start to look at utility computing as an attractive option, a company like Enki or Joyent may have grown into a real competitor.
Sun Microsystems is betting big on utility computing, a new model that would make processing time available to businesses on demand, much in the same way they buy utilities like gas and electricity.
"Our customers told us that it was difficult and expensive to transcode video due to the explosion in the number of devices they need to support, " said Charlie Bell, Vice President of Utility Computing Services.
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Arguably more than any other government agencies, their missions require a fabric of utility computing that scales on demand and enables self discovery and self-service access to secure, timely and relevant information in support of mission: individual or shared.
MySQL's lighter-weight database system may also fit into Sun's ambitions of becoming a major player in "utility computing, " a model of information technology infrastructure that pipes in software applications, processing and storage over the Internet rather than from a company's own data centers.
The reason utility computing has stayed on the shelf for the past decade or so is that the tools available to aspiring cloud providers (originally called ASPs, or application service providers) were no different than the tools available to the enterprise at the time: high-performance, scale-up hardware systems that were powerful, but expensive and inflexible.
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This liquefaction of hardware, in turn, will allow computing to become a utility, and software a service delivered online.
For computing to become a utility, which is the promise of the cloud, a data centre cannot be a hotch-potch of boxes cobbled together from different vendors, but must be tightly integrated.
And yet, though some years away, the very idea of utility-style computing is making waves today.
But for computing to be bought and sold as a utility, firms must be able to switch vendors, to do it for all their computing functions, and with meter-based pricing.
Value charging is a unique feature that harnesses the power of cloud computing to automatically charge the vehicle when utility rates are lowest, thus helping to minimize the cost to charge the vehicle and the potential ownership costs of an electric vehicle.
Some of IBM's first customers for the new style of selling include Levi Strauss, Mobil Travel Guides...and IBM itself, which is loading up on z990s so it can sell computing power from its data centers on a utility basis to smaller customers.
Today, Carr writes, computing is following that same path from tool to utility.
Enki may not be able to leverage millions of servers like big companies including Sun Microsystems, Amazon, or IBM, which are also offering utility, or "cloud, " computing services.
It is all part of an overall program of "missionary work, " in Zeitler's words, to get customers consolidating their gear and buying computing power as if it were electricity from a utility.
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