Sun Announces Record Grid Compute Utility Deal

Virtual Compute Corporation has agreed to use more than 1 million hours of central processing units on Sun Microsystems' Grid Compute Utility.

Sun announced the development earlier this week, saying it's the company's largest grid compute utility deal yet. VCC is using the grid to serve customers in the oil and gas industry. The company will gain access to thousands of CPUs through the Sun Grid, which is based on Sun Fire V20z servers and powered by AMD Opteron processor-based systems.

Sun claims the agreement marks a new era in energy industry use of utility computing. Stuart Wells, VCC executive vice president of utility computing at Sun, said in a prepared statement earlier this week that the deal underscores growing demand for flexible resources and marks a turning point for companies' IT spending.

Sun Grid provides an open computing infrastructure on a utility basis, charging $1 per CPU per hour pay-per-use.

VCC provides high performance computing and IT infrastructure management tailored for commercial and government use.