Content area
A number of companies, including hardware manufacturers and systems integrators are leaping into the grid computing market to offer customers utility computing resources on demand. Instead of buying their own servers, customers could subscribe to a service from one of these utility computing firms and consume only the computing cycles they required. Customers to a utility service like this wouldn't have systems sitting idle and they wouldn't have to worry about managing their own computing resources.
One company that's gung-ho about this form of grid computing is Sun Microsystems, which is setting up a series of grid computing centres across the world.
Sun's entry into the utility computing market was driven largely by customer demand, said Aisling MacRunnels, senior director of utility computing for Sun. Banks and resources firms were becoming frustrated that they were spending a lot of time becoming experts in setting up data centres and running grid architectures, instead of focusing on their core businesses, she said.