Grid Meter » Service Attack on Sun Grid

March 23, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Service Attack on Sun Grid

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One of the promises of Grid -- as a platform for distributed, virtualized applications -- is that it will deliver a quality of service beyond simple hosted applications.

Yesterday, on its maiden voyage, Sun Grid was hit by a denial of service attack. (Stephen Shankland at CNET broke the story yesterday evening).

The value proposition for companies to go outside of their corporate firewalls for compute horsepower or data storage is greatly diminished if there is a question mark around reliability of service. In Sun's defense, I understand that sometimes service interruptions "just happen," and a chain is only a strong as its weakest link. And in this particular case, the service that was attacked was publicly exposed instead of being available only to members of the club.

However, every time my service provider drops a call on my mobile phone I'm quick to blame the phone itself and toss it aside in disgust. Hopefully Sun's prospective customers will overlook the snag and make the leap of faith.

The timing on this denial of service attack -- so immediately after the official, highly-promoted launch -- was a cruel twist of fate. And kudos to Sun for pushing the envelope with a truly public grid.

However, when we in the community use the term Grid, we need to all make sure that it is more than just the same old hosted apps with the same old problems.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on March 23, 2006 08:01 AM

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