Sun wants computing to be commodity

If it sounds familiar, that would be because it is the same vision of the future that has been touted by IBM and HP for ages but never quite got off the ground.

According to Cnet, sun Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz made the first small steps by unveiled a service by which customers can run some computing jobs on Sun machines for a cost of $1 per processor per hour.

Not much of a leap forward, in fact IBM and Hewlett-Packard already offer such services, though with different pricing plans. Schwartz hopes that organisations with extra processing power can sell it back to a computing grid. In the US homes with solar panels can sell power back to the electrical power grid and he thinks that is a pretty neat idea to try with computers. He said that if the exchanges are dormant at night, they can feed capacity back to the network, although he admits it will need some hefty security technology.

Of course there was a dollop of the usual PR catch phrases such as 'in the long run, all computing will be done this way.'