The grid facilities will also serve as a way to use idle hardware. Sun will load and test software on its servers bound for customers by putting the servers on the Sun Grid first, said McNealy -- a testing process known as "burning in" a server. Spare parts and servers produced for warranty purposes will also be hooked to the grid.
"If you have a spare component, you put it on the grid," he said. The grid will first be housed in existing Sun facilities and built up gradually.
"I don't want to be in the bricks-and-mortar industry," McNealy said. "We could go for a first mover advantage and bury the economics of this thing. We've done the modelling and analysis and it's quite profitable."
Sun's public statements underplay lost-opportunity costs, noted Kevin Krewell, editor in chief of Microprocessor Report. It still takes time, employees and money to build a grid, after all.
"Also, where do they draw the line between 'burn in' and 'used'?" Krewell asked.
While Sun will charge $1 per CPU hour now, prices could drop. Schwartz broadly hinted Thursday that Sun will make an announcement that it will partner with another company to create an exchange for hourly computing power and storage.
Same old Sun
No Sun event would be complete without a Fidel Castro-like claim that Sun is fighting nobly against a malignant, outside force. But this time it wasn't Microsoft, which gave Sun millions in a multi-pronged alliance last year and was identified as one of the key software providers for the future.
Instead, today's bogeyman is IBM Global Services.
"It is humankind versus IBM Global Services, and we are kind of the leader of mankind in this aspect," is how McNealy described the current environment for grid computing. IBM Global Services was identified as an enemy of humanity (and an expensive one at that) at least two other times during the afternoon.
But competition with Microsoft, at least on an intellectual level, continues. Speaking on the digital divide, Schwartz said the biggest problem in the spread of computing is the cost of computers, not bandwidth.
"The digital divide is due to the expense of the client you use to get the bandwidth," Schwartz said.
In January, Microsoft Chair Bill Gates said in an interview that the price of bandwidth, not the cost of access devices, is the factor holding back the spread of computing.
