Sun President Jonathan Schwartz this morning presents a blog item that, he says, "is one of those blogs you wait a career to write." It's on his company's forthcoming grid, which the company will charge $1/cpu-hr to use:

The Sun Grid (which will be officially unveiled in a few days) is an offering we and our partners will be expanding over the months and years to come - like any good product, there's no end to the innovation possible. This represents not only the future of product development at Sun, but like the Java platform and the internet itself, it really represents the future of computing.

More details are here, at Network.com, a URL Sun acquired in its pickup of StorageTek.

How has it been for Sun in building a market? Writes Schwartz:

As an example, for the past 15 months, we've been negotiating with one financial institution interested in leveraging our grid for spike loads of portfolio simulations. When their procurement team held up the contract to start negotiating the gauge of chain link we'd use around the grid, and which vendors were approved to supply network cables, we gingerly passed them back to our traditional sales channels - this was clearly a customer that would prefer to build their own infrastructure (can you imagine arguing with PayPal over chain link?). So be it, that's where most IT is purchased today, and will likely be purchased for decades to come. But there's no denying there's a change occurring.

According to Schwartz, it's been more difficult getting corporate users to embrace the Sun Grid than it has been for outfits like Google to get the market to embrace its grid.

Sun executives said last year that there would be a role for Sun's channel in selling - or participating - in the Sun Grid.

Ahead of the unveiling, Schwartz explains some caveats, including, "First, in this first release, the Sun Grid will be available only to customers inside the US," due to export constraints; and, "Second, don't expect instant account provisioning," as risk and security issues will hold it to between a few hours and a day. Schwartz also writes that the Sun Grid will open on Day 1 with 5,000 CPU sockets (Opteron and UltraSparc) and that web services APIs will eventually be available.

Tom White, at Java.net, writes that "The pay-as-you-go model of S3 (and Sun Grid) would be very attractive to developers who want to run ad hoc computations, or can't afford the upfront investment in hardware."

And blogger and IT consultant Stefan Tilkov writes, "I usually don’t give a damn what Sun does or doesn’t do, but this is truly revolutionary. "