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.

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Founded in 2004, 3Tera was in many ways the first commercial utility computing platform.

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But for now, those larger companies are treating utility computing services as side projects or experiments.

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