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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Systems/Enterprise:
OTTAWA FIRM OFFERS UTILITY MODEL
TO SEMICONDUCTOR FIRMS
An Ottawa-based supplier of computing power has launched a utility service
executives said could offer significant cost savings to semiconductor
companies.
GridWay Computing Corp, which calls itself Ottawa's first commercial
computing
utility, announced this week that it will open a data center in the capital
city to provide chip designers with pay-as-you-go computing capacity.
Until now, moving data quickly and securely between a client and a utility
has
been limited by high costs and high-bandwidth connectivity, explained Chris
Kramer, GridWay's founder.
In an attempt to overcome these hurdles, the company has partnered with
Telecom Ottawa to ensure customers in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City,
Kingston and Cornwall have high-speed access to GridWay's computing power via
Telecom Ottawa's Ethernet network.
GridWay has turned to Sun Microsystems of Canada for its enabling
technology,
including a Grid of 40 Sun Fire V60x servers running Red Hat Linux.
"We enable companies to purchase IT services as they would electricity,
right
from your high-end engineering compute farm, or Grid computing model, to data
availability and managed hosting services," said Kramer.
The service is significant for semiconductor companies because almost all
of
them encounter "spikes in demand that don't last," said Doug Girvin, president
of Sun STANTIVE solutions, the sales organization for Sun Microsystems in
southeastern Ontario and the National Capital Region.
To provide enough in-house computing capacity to meet those peak periods, a
large portion of a company's system would just be idling for the remainder of
the year, he said. "So there's a huge capital cost (to doing so)." GridWay
plans to offset these costs.
"You can dial us up when you need us and dial us down when you don't, so
you're only paying for what you're using," said Kramer.
Warren Shiau, a senior software analyst with IDC Canada, agreed that in a
lot
of cases this route is a cost-effective one for the same reasons that surround
any outsourcing deal where portions of a company's operations are farmed out
to contractors. And, he added, "the market for hosting applications for a
temporary period of time, or permanently, is large.
"(GridWay) has all the classic ingredients of having a data center. They
have
a good deal on network capacity and computing. They are going to provide that
peak usage capacity (to semiconductor companies) so (customers) don't have to
build infrastructure to provide (it themselves) and have it sit unutilized for
nine or 10 months out of the year."
Kramer said the company has just completed a pilot with Tundra
Semiconductor
of Ottawa. In the past, Tundra's peak period of chip testing meant the
prospect of purchasing 20 Sun V60s, which costs roughly $120,000, said Kramer.
"In our model, they were permitted to extend their compute farm by 20
processors for $3,000."
As well as officially signing on Tundra as a customer, GridWay's clients
include TCC Canada, a flexible office space provider and ALTF, a Hull-based
producer of X-ray and extreme ultraviolet light sources used in the production
of semiconductors.
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