"With the Force10 E-Series we are reducing the number of switches in a typical Sun Grid installation more than twenty fold and building reliable and predictable computing infrastructures that our customers can leverage to process and analyse data without the cost of owning and managing a network", stated Jim Parkinson, vice president of engineering for Sun Grid at Sun Microsystems. "By utilizing Sun Grid, educational institutions, financial establishments and oil and gas companies can access computing power when they need it, with no hidden costs, thereby increasing data centre capacity and better managing project and usage volatility."

The Sun Grid Compute Utility service allows companies to purchase or lease computing time on the network to optimize resource utilization. Many organizations require heavy computing resources for only a few hours of the day, leaving the resources underused for the remaining hours. The Sun Grid Compute Utility provides these organisations with a flexible, cost-effective alternative to building and maintaining their own infrastructures by enabling companies to purchase, increase or decrease computing power and time on the network as needed.

The Force10 TeraScale E-Series will initially be deployed in a 500-node network that will be used to develop and test the utility compute programme. Future data centres around the world will deploy the same architecture with 1000 or 2000 nodes.

"The Sun Grid Compute Utility network is truly revolutionizing how companies can cost effectively manage their compute needs without the expense of building and managing their own cluster and Grid computing networks", stated Mark Cooper, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Force10 Networks. "As the anchor of the Sun Grid Utility, the TeraScale E-Series is providing the reliability and scalability Sun Grid requires to deliver flexible computing services to its customers."

The Force10 TeraScale E-Series delivers the industry-leading density and unmatched resiliency Sun Grid requires to collapse multiple layers of its network into a single layer and reduce the number of switches required to connect the servers. Supporting 1260 Gigabit and 224 Ten Gigabit Ethernet ports per system, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series simplifies management of the Compute Utility network.

With more than one million access control lists (ACLs), the Force10 TeraScale E-Series is uniquely able to provide Sun Grid with the control it requires to separate and insulate customer traffic. In addition to the ingress ACLs, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series delivers three further layers of security with ACLs at both the Layer 2 and Layer 3 levels as well as egress ACLs. Together, these four levels of protection ensure that Sun Grid protects sensitive customer traffic from other Sun Grid Compute Utility customers.

Utility computing is an outsourced provisioning model in which a provider makes computing resources and infrastructure management available to customers as needed and charges for specific usage. Utility computing seeks to meet fluctuating customer needs to maximize the efficient use of resources and/or minimize associated costs.