Outsourced ‘computing on demand’ seems to be taking off as witnessed by recent announcements from several IT hardware vendors. HP’s Flexible Computing Services offering has been taken up by Schlumberger to provide reservoir simulation customers with the extra compute cycles and improved performance they need to run large numbers of reservoir simulations. The ‘public utility’ computing model, trialed with HP’s EU clients, offers peak shaving for other heavy users of CPU power such as seismic processors and software developers.
Sun
Sun Microsystems’ partner Virtual Compute Corporation (VCC), has just signed an agreement with Paradigm for the provision of CPU cycles on the Sun Grid Compute Utility. The deal offers Paradigm quick access to thousands of Sun Fire V20z Opteron-based servers. VCC resells Sun’s Grid to the oil and gas vertical. Sun has 2,000 CPUs in New York and another 3,000 in London serving the financial services sector and is working with energy companies to establish presence in Houston.
APPRO
Appro partnered with CyrusOne to open its Compute on Demand Center (CODC) in Houston this month. The CODC is claimed to be one of the few ‘top tier’ data centers in the country engineered specifically to address grid computing.
IBM
Finally, IBM’s ‘deep computing on demand’ is still available from its Houston-based data center opened last year. IBM grid clients include SINOPEC, El Paso, PGS, Paradigm (again) and Landmark.
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