Sun's announcement marks the information technology industry's latest step toward "utility computing, " a grid system in which companies pipe in data processing and storage from faraway server farms, says Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, a book on utility computing published earlier this week.
Ordinary databases and grid may be too slow, but ScaleOut Software stores data in memory on server farms or uses distributed caching on compute grids, to eliminate bottlenecks and reduce latency.