Sun Gives Away Hardware, Appistry

This article shows just how crazy the server business is going to get in the next few months, years. Of particular interest is that Sun is now giving away hardware, and relying on maintenence contracts to make some bucks. Also, enter a new player on the scene - Appistry, a company that provides the grid to run large scale application on. What's the big deal? Well:

But the greatest value of Appistry's approach to virtualization may come in the way it affects the work habits of users. Bioinformatics researchers at one pharmaceutical company were used to running an algorithm that took six hours to run on one processor, making it essentially a batch process. While the job was running the researcher could do little more than wait. Applied to an application fabric of 150 processors, that batch process now runs in 144 seconds, making it effectively interactive and changing completely the way the company uses its manpower and does research. THAT's innovation.

Indeed, wow. More on this to come.