Building on the strong customer response to its recently announced Sun N1 Grid Utility Computing Pay- For-Use Cycles, the new offering will make affordable and agile pay-for-use services available to customers with high performance, compute-intensive requirements for short- to mid-term needs, as well as spikes in demand. This latest move further expands Sun's portfolio of compute and storage utility- priced offerings, which help to reduce IT costs and capital expenditures, to speed time to market, to improve asset utilization, and to provide the agility customers need to better align IT costs to business activity.

The Sun Utility Computing for High-end Grid offering will be delivered through Sun partners -- including Atos Origin, CGI and EDS -- and is designed to address the compute-intensive requirements and business needs of customers in industries such as petroleum and energy, life sciences, financial services, media and entertainment, automotive and manufacturing. The new offering provides enhanced, value-added services from Sun's partners, such as private and secure partitioning within a data center; options for large data sets or custom applications; customization services for unique workload requirements; architecture design; grid application tuning and integration; data management services; pay-per-use storage; and partner-provided applications and management.

"Sun and our partners are setting the standard for utility computing as a model for reducing costs, and customers are showing tremendous interest in Sun's portfolio of solutions and pay-for-use offerings," said Terry Erdle, vice president, worldwide strategy and marketing, services and solutions, Sun Microsystems. "By adding our new Sun Utility Computing for High-end Grid offering to our other utility compute, storage and N1 Grid Computing Pay-Per- Use Cycle offerings, we are leveling the playing fields across all industries and for all sizes of businesses. No longer should peak demands, lack of access, or infrastructure acquisition costs be a hurdle to business success."

Partners Drive New Utility Model for High Performance Grid Computing

The Sun Utility Computing for High-end Grid offering will be initially delivered by Sun partners Atos Origin, CGI and EDS, providing a secure platform of distributed resources including high-performance Sun Fire V20z servers, Sun N1 Grid Engine software and the Solaris Operating System or Linux software optimized for compute-intensive workloads. Options to use other grid applications will also be available through Sun's partners. Designed as a grid computing infrastructure that provides dependable, highly scalable compute power delivered over the network on a pay-for-use basis, this offering will enable customers to leverage a single point of access to thousands of nodes in a compute-rich environment from Sun's partners - whenever the customer needs it most.