Grid Meter » Energy Sector Ready to Buy Utility Computing?

November 09, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Energy Sector Ready to Buy Utility Computing?

TAGS: None

Two years ago, everywhere you looked, a VP of marketing at a major systems vendor was proselytizing the future of compute resources on demand. At a certain point, when it became somewhat obvious that the end user market for utility computing had not yet arrived, it seemed that utility computing noise / frenzy was placed on the backburner.

Today, Sun and a company called Virtual Compute Corporation announced a partnership that would suggest they are preparing for a groundswell of utility computing customers in the energy sector. The announcement is more cheerleading than specifics, but the nuts and bolts of it are that VCC has agreed to use more than 1 million hours of CPUs on the Sun Grid -- via their energy customers.

Earlier this year, VCC also announced an agreement with MCI, 'allowing the company to provide global reach to clients of their high performance computing resources.' So in a short period of time, they've announced a partnership with one of the largest service providers, and one of the largest systems vendors. It's pretty aggressive posturing -- it will be interesting to meter how quickly the company can actually sell utility computing in the energy sector.

Several months ago, Ian Foster explained a Grid computing broker / consumer continuum. He explained that as the utility computing model grows, we'll not only see the very large compute resource brokers (Sun, in this case), and the actual end user consumers -- we'll also see a new class of middleman / solution provider pop up. Virtual Compute Corporation falls under that category, and I have no doubt that specific markets (like oil and gas) require very specific computing needs, and that specialized companies like VCC will continue to crop up as a new type of mega compute reseller.

But I also think the market is still very early-stage ... and in particular, there's no general consensus on the end user side about when and why to decide to outsource Grid, rather than building in-house. Is the timing right for this particular company? Or is the model still a few years before its time? Only time will tell.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 9, 2005 07:39 AM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: