Sunday, October 7, 2007

Sun Grid vs Amazon EC2

This is kind of like comparing apples to oranges, but I'm sure it's crossed some peoples minds:

Amazon EC2
  • $0.10 per CPU hour ($72 / month)
  • An instance is roughly equivalent to a system with a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth (bursting to 1Gb)
  • Linux
  • Infinite storage via S3

Sun Grid
  • $1.00 per CPU hour ($720 per month)
  • SunFire dual processor Opteron-based servers with 4 GB of RAM per CPU, Solaris 10 OS, and Sun Grid Engine 6 software.
  • Solaris 10
  • Is there any long term storage option? Doesn't look like it from what I can see.
$72 per month for EC2 which allows you to run anything your heart desires on a fresh linux install. $720 per month for Sun Grid which appears to be very restricted (a "new feature" on the Sun Grid is Internet Access! Wow!). Sun Grid really appears to be for real compute jobs, not for your average every day application. You select an application, upload data, create and run a job, then download the results.

Which would you choose?

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