3 ms·

Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot about grid computing, which was essentially what we call public cloud now. In a slightly different univ

by pavlov 4y ago

Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot about grid computing, which was essentially what we call public cloud now. In a slightly different universe Sun would be AWS.

DamonHD 4y ago
Sun kept touting a service that we would call cloud, and I kept trying to buy it for one of my financial clients, but it never happened...
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  Sun was very much enterprise, nice reliability and support but commodity hardware completely blew them away for most purposes. They were still selling $10k workstations when a cheap consumer PC running Linux would run laps around it.
  - unxdfa 4y ago
    Linux didn't even dent it in my universe back then. Between 1996 and 1999 we switched our internal systems from Solaris to NT. Even our Oracle on HP/UX estate got eaten by SQL Server 7. Our 1999 capex and opex was 25% of what it was in 1996 and we delivered more benefits to our users.
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  It was nigh impossible to find on their website a place where you could pay them to sell you things, it was sad but not surprising that they were going under.
throw0101c 4y ago
> Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot about grid computing […] Not (just) talking, but offering: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud Also: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Grid_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Grid_Engine
yankcrime 4y ago
I worked at Sun for a period on Sun Grid. There were two offerings - one aimed at B2B and one that was public-facing. The latter was launched as network.com, and essentially offered the ability to submit a job and only pay for the processing power used, hence Scott McNealy's "$1 per CPU per hour!" utility computing promotion. The B2B side (which is the implementation I worked on) was quite a bit different, with customers uploading a 'golden image' into a node which would then be used to pre-provision a pod of servers (i.e 512 x v20z) on demand. There's certainly an argument that Sun were first to tout cloud IaaS, but what was missing was a decent API to all this.

by pavlov 4y ago

Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot about grid computing, which was essentially what we call public cloud now. In a slightly different universe Sun would be AWS.

DamonHD 4y ago

Sun kept touting a service that we would call cloud, and I kept trying to buy it for one of my financial clients, but it never happened...

tinus_hn 4y ago
Sun was very much enterprise, nice reliability and support but commodity hardware completely blew them away for most purposes. They were still selling $10k workstations when a cheap consumer PC running Linux would run laps around it.
- unxdfa 4y ago
  Linux didn't even dent it in my universe back then. Between 1996 and 1999 we switched our internal systems from Solaris to NT. Even our Oracle on HP/UX estate got eaten by SQL Server 7. Our 1999 capex and opex was 25% of what it was in 1996 and we delivered more benefits to our users.
forgetfulness 4y ago
It was nigh impossible to find on their website a place where you could pay them to sell you things, it was sad but not surprising that they were going under.

throw0101c 4y ago

> Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot about grid computing […] Not (just) talking, but offering: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud Also: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Grid_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Grid_Engine

yankcrime 4y ago

I worked at Sun for a period on Sun Grid. There were two offerings - one aimed at B2B and one that was public-facing. The latter was launched as network.com, and essentially offered the ability to submit a job and only pay for the processing power used, hence Scott McNealy's "$1 per CPU per hour!" utility computing promotion. The B2B side (which is the implementation I worked on) was quite a bit different, with customers uploading a 'golden image' into a node which would then be used to pre-provision a pod of servers (i.e 512 x v20z) on demand. There's certainly an argument that Sun were first to tout cloud IaaS, but what was missing was a decent API to all this.