Sun Microsystems retires utility computing service
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Once again the future of computing is consigned to history, but Sun promises more cloud to come
Sun Microsystems has announced that it is to stop selling its grid computing service Network.com in favour of cloud computing services.
The company, which more than any other has affiliated itself with the idea of centralised, ‘networked’ computing, said that no new customers will be added to Network.com, though its 13 existing customers will be offered continuing service.
The service offered customers access to remote processing for $1 per CPU per hour, and $1 per GB of storage. It was slow to find users when launched in 2005 and never became the revolutionary computing model that Sun had anticipated, it now appears. The company suggested that while the idea behind Network.com was sound, the way the computing services were offered were not appropriate for the mass market.
"[Network.com] was kind of an early attempt at cloud computing. We got some features right and some not right," said Dave Douglas, senior vice president of Sun's cloud computing division.
Sun – which earlier this month announced 6,000 redundancies and a dramatic restructuring – said it will focus its utility computing efforts on so-called ‘cloud computing’ services.
At a press and analyst conference yesterday, the company said it sees cloud computing as having three layers – whole applications delivered as a service, such as Salesforce.com or Google Apps, web-based platforms on which to execute applications, such as Force.com of the Google App Engine, and cloud-based computing components such as Amazon Web Services.
Sun’s cloud computing strategy will be detailed in full in the new year, it said. It intends to focus on the latter two layers of the cloud stack.
In other cloud computing news, book retailer turned utility computing provider Amazon today announced the availability of its Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) services in
See the December 2008 issue of Information Age for a discussion of cloud computing in the enteprise
Further reading
The dangers of cloud computing
Report calls for businesses to wake up to the security challenges of using Internet-based computing services
Sun Microsystems to lay off 6,000 staff
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