Q & A
Interview with Hal Stern and Hal Jespersen
Tuesday, Mar. 8, 1:00 PM PT
Hal Stern, Chief Technology Officer for Sun Services, and Hal
Jespersen, Distinguished Engineer, Sun Wall Street Technologies,
recently discussed how financial institutions benefit from Sun's new
utility computing model.
Q: What are the top challenges Sun Microsystems helps financial
institutions address?
Hal Jespersen: Financial institutions are looking for IT solutions
that help them address regulatory compliance,
consolidation/optimization and grid computing challenges. Sun offers
a range of products and services that help institutions consolidate
and optimize their systems. For example, Solaris 10 features Dtrace
technology, services management and fault management.
Q: Why are firms on Wall Street interested in grid?
Hal Jespersen: Wall Street firms are the commercial leaders in using
grid technology. They use it for Monte Carlo simulations, pricing
and credit derivatives, and wealth or portfolio management. In
general, these firms are looking for price and performance to
execute trades faster and cheaper.
Q: Why would utility computing be of use to Wall Street?
Hal Jespersen: Firms have limited resources and require additional
compute power only for a few hours per day. This model provides them
with the additional resources, without having to purchase new
hardware that they do not need.
Q: Have firms raised any speed or security issues?
Hal Stern: Previously, Wall Street firms did not share grids across
departments, or with other companies, for fear of slowing down
active traders in their jobs, but this is changing. N1 service
provisioning servers allow us to repurpose existing computers for
new functions quickly. It wipes discs clean and re-provisions it
from scratch. For a large firm requiring 1,000 CPUs, it would take
approximately 40 minutes. Re-provisioning is done at no charge. It
is similar to the rental car model. Customers are only paying for
the time.
Q: Has there been customer interest since the launch of this model?
Hal Jespersen: Sun has already received strong interest from every
firm on Wall Street, as well as and some firms in the U.K. For example, we received a call from a large
financial institution, requesting if it was possible to receive
5,000 CPUs for 12 hours/day. It's inexpensive for Sun because we
already own the hardware and software. We can also spread usage
across a range of customers, resulting in 100 percent utilization.
Q: What is Sun offering to small and medium sized businesses (SMBs)?
Hal Stern: This model is ideal for SMBs because they do not need to
invest in high-end hardware. They can buy one hour or 1,000 hours.
Q: Is Sun pitching SMBs as aggressively as they are pitching the large firms?
Hal Stern: At this moment, there is significant interest from the
large financial firms. Our partners often handle sales to the SMBs.
Q: Are there any geographic differences that influence interest?
Hal Stern: There is worldwide interest, but obviously, in markets
that are space, power and cooling constrained like New York City,
the grid has gathered much more attention. When you can't build
your data center out any further, options for external data centers
are attractive and usually more cost effective.
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