INDUSTRY

Sun Microsystems announced the Sun Grid Readiness Offer, a comprehensive new partner offering that gives ISVs quick access to the resources they need to help build solutions based on grid computing technologies from Sun. This offering allows ISVs to build innovative new Grid business models, drive sales opportunities, and deliver solutions using Sun's grid technology. Sun's grid computing products and technologies included in the program are Sun Grid, the Sun N1 software products and the Sun Grid Rack Systems, which integrate the new family of industry-standard Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers powered with the AMD Opteron processor and pre-loaded with the Solaris 10 Operating System. The Sun Grid Readiness Offer is part of the Sun Partner Advantage Program, which gives ISVs quick access to the resources needed to build solutions based on Sun technologies. Sun also unveiled the new Sun Grid Developer Community, which provides developers with a framework and community in which to "play" on the Sun Grid in order to develop and implement commercially available applications for the Sun Grid. Sun Grid Developer Community is a site for developers to discover new information as well as discuss, collaborate, exchange source code and ideas about utility computing. The first project in the Sun Grid Developer Community is a pilot project which will grant all qualified participants limited access to the Sun Grid. Sun made the announcements at the GridWorld Conference in Boston, a new event focused on the commercial benefits of Grid computing for enterprise IT strategists worldwide. "As one of the fastest growing areas of technology, our partners want to engage with Sun to offer grid-based solutions on Sun technology," said Stephen Borcich, vice president of partner marketing at Sun. "The Sun Grid Readiness Offer is one of the best ways for our partners to share ideas and technology and is the central point for our partners to go for information on all things Grid at Sun." The Sun Grid Readiness Offer provides a four-step process so that ISVs can offer grid computing solutions to a variety of industries. Some of the program benefits include using Sun's grid infrastructure to access tools, software, servers and storage. The program also provides access to Sun's Grid Toolkit, which contains downloads, whitepapers, usecases, webinar trainings and access to the Partner Solutions Catalogue, that helps customers identify all Sun's grid computing solution offerings. Partners such as Enigmatec, Gigaspaces, Intelliden, Paremus, Platform Computing, Tideway Systems and Turboworx are already offering or working with Sun to offer grid computing solutions, service management solutions and/or software as a service solutions. For more information, customers can visit its Web site. "Server-grid functionality is integral to Informatica's enterprise data integration solution, helping customers leverage existing hardware-server assets to increase IT responsiveness and enhance data integration performance and cost-effectiveness," said Girish Pancha, executive vice president, products at Informatica. "We are pleased to support the Sun Grid Readiness Offer, which represents a structured way for Sun's ISV partners to help their customers further leverage the power of grid computing within a Sun environment." Sun delivers ISVs three clear revenue opportunities through the Sun Grid Readiness Offer. They include: -- The Sun Grid offerings, which help partners derive immediate benefits from an open, grid-based computing infrastructure on a utility basis by giving them more choice and control over how they purchase and leverage IT. The Sun Grid offerings include the Sun Grid compute utility, a $1 (USD) per CPU per hour pay-per-use offering ($1/cpu-hr), and the Sun Grid storage utility. -- The x64 Sun Grid Rack Systems, which help partners add value to their systems by having their technology integrated as part of the solution. The Sun Grid Rack Systems also help customers accelerate the implementation and deployment of grid-based high performance computing (HPC) and Web services applications by up to 90 percent, and provide a new way of deploying grid solutions one rack at a time. For more information on the new x64 Sun Grid Rack Systems, please visit: its Web site. -- The Sun N1 software product line, including the Sun N1 SystemManager, which simplifies infrastructure lifecycle management for Sun Fire x64 and SPARC processor-based servers; the Sun N1 Service Provisioning System, which enables application lifecycle management by rapidly provisioning business services that span multiple tiers -- Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Application servers, Web servers, and databases across heterogeneous environments; and the Sun N1 Grid Engine software, which helps to optimize utilization by intelligently mapping compute-intensive workloads onto networked resources based on predefined policies.