Secure multi-tenancy is the key to utility computing, and now we can scale more securely.

We want to be able to do this with partners. Five thousand computers is a conservative start.

It became the focus of a denial of service attack.

We want to get the pod size down to the point where we can partition down to a single box.

These kinds of attacks are really a pretty regular occurrence for any Internet company.

We had to defend against a bunch. There were too many coming against us, so we moved it inside.

There's no sales rep, and we are not negotiating, so the price is fixed at $1 per CPU per hour. People are talking about software as a service. This is computing as a service, and no one else is doing this.

The problem was resolved quickly. The Sun Grid was not compromised and there was no degradation of service for users inside the Sun Grid.

We decided to go out with a commercial model relatively quickly, where we could start bringing on large customers and have them run large compute jobs so we could test the scale and flexibility of the Sun Grid.