Sun Microsystems plans to announce a plan Tuesday to let customers rent supercomputing power from the company’s data centers, paying for exactly as much muscle as they need. Also, Sun is in talks to purchase a profitable Linux distributor, sources have told internetnews.com. Sources close to the discussions said they expected that company to be embedded Linux player MontaVista, but cautioned that the deal wasn’t finalized and talks could still break down.
Sun Begins pay-as-you-go Supercomputing; Sun to buy MontaVista?
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Do you receive a bill for ten thousand dollars if your process goes awry for several days?
I wager they’d kill it the very second the time you paid for is up.
Let someone with a bit of vision invest in Montavista if they need that.
I can see Sun buying them up and either killing off their Linux romance or horribly mishandling it much like all of Sun’s other projects. Sun is beginning to smell like the dead fish in the computing industry. Hopefully they will either shape up or die off, so as not to take any bright stars down with them in a desperate bid to stay afloat.
Sun is likely to setup Gridengine to control the cluster, so you can setup a wallclock (or real) time limit.
http://gridengine.sunsource.net
(Gridengine is opensource and free!)
well 1993 or 1994 I think it was…. Microsoft were giving the final specs for Windows 95 and Scotty boy was doing the rounds at computer fairs all around the world.
he was trying to sell us the idea of thin clients, renting time on mainframes and hiring application time.
he was going on about not having expensive hardware to buy, not having expensive software to buy, just a dumb terminal and a connection……..
at the time, sun was slated by everyone for trying to take computing back to the 1960s when people actually had setups like that.
roll on 2004…..
sun is still trying to get everyone in on this really dimwitted idea.
people want “their own” hardware, “their own” software and dont like the idea of owning nothing but the files they produce
1) Not to sound cynical, but SUN Microsystems is a little late to what IBM likes to call IIRC Utility Computing. This is an old idea with a new spin; anyone remember the old days when you used to purchase a dumb terminal, modem and purchase time from the local mainframe operator? its the same thing, with a slight twist, you don’t use a modem 😉 you use a high speed connection.
Not that there is anything wrong with the idea; for example, if for 6 days out of the whole year a company needs a whole heap of grunt to process some customer account records, it is much more cost effective to rent out time on a large computer than it would be to have a large computer installed and not utilised for 359 days of the year.
2) Regarding the embedded linux vendor, I think it is a good move. Get into the embedded space, possibly push SPARC IIe as a good alternative to ARM and MIPS for small devices, load it with a ultra-tweaked version of Java, oh, and most importantly, ensure there are good development tools available. If they do that, they will make a sizable amount off it.
What I do hope, however, is that they don’t make the same mistake as they did with Cobalt, namely, trying to fuse two completely different company cultures and sales channels under the one roof.
Cobalt being a face to face small business vendor, and SUN being a company (as inefficient as it is) working through partners, which IMHO is a pathetically inefficient way of delivering products to customers, but hey, I’m not an MBA wizz kid like McNealy, so what would I know?
…Sun plans to beat all those Linux companies by buying them out.
Shush, nobody tell ’em its free.
and other Sunnies. Q&A and chat at
http://sunchat.savvis.tv/post/20040921/
Nah in 1994 Mcnealy was a visionary 10 years ahead of his time. The world has finally caught up
Shush, nobody tell ’em its free.
Heh, it amazes me that IBM/Sun/HP/Dell spend money on licensing Linux from Redhat and Novell when that money should actually go to smaller guys like Debian, Slackware and Gentoo.
This is so interesting after the guy who sold Cobalt to Sun for 1billon goes to MonteVista and now tries to get Sun to bit e again!. How stupid is Sun?
best regards
Dev
This wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that a lot of the embedded devices running montavista linux are running on powerpc hardware would it ?
Methinks Sun is taking potshots at IBM again.
i highly doubt sun will screw up montavista. Sun has become profitable under new leadership (schwartz – leader over all operations – COO)
Schwartz Loves linux.. but he hates red hat.. has some weird obsession with how horrible they are.
With that being said.. I think sun should concentrate more on hardware than software. Why buy a embedded linux distro when you can make one yourself for free or just download it and brand it for your own? They really had a chance with embedded SPARC but no, they screwed it over… I guess they decided to let Texas Instruments be the only major embedded sparc vendor.
it really isn’t sun’s place.