One week after touting its grid computing and other technologies on Wall Street for financial services customers, Sun Microsystems agreed to provide a Paris-based bank with more than 100 servers to power its transactions

One week after touting its grid computing and other technologies on Wall Street for financial services customers, Sun Microsystems agreed to provide a Paris-based bank with more than 100 servers to power its transactions. Under the deal, Sun will provide Equity and Derivatives BNP Paribas 116 Sun Fire V20z servers powered by AMD's Opteron chips to improve the performance of its risk management software, which runs on a compute grid. There is a no official word of the value of the contract, but V20z servers with one to two processors tend to run between $3,000 and $5,000 each, depending on configurations. Peter ffoulkes, group marketing manager of Sun's High Performance and Technical Computing division, said the bank has chosen to break free from an x86 cluster it had used from a competing vendor in favor of the V20z machines, running Red Hat Linux. Equity and Derivatives chose Sun's infrastructure to help it address Basle II, an international risk management regulation put in place to avoid some of the accounting improprieties if the late '90s, according to ffoulkes. "Those audit trails hopefully will be beneficial over time but they pose quite a headache for the banks who have to do all of their business within the same time frame but with the weight of a lot of regulatory compliance," ffoulkes said. "To do that, they need to enhance their computer systems." That means grid computing. Traditionally, grid computing is used to either harness a pool resources and fire a lot of jobs at them with great efficiency or complete tasks in a parallel mode and run things like crash tests. It can also be expensive for enterprises to offer. Just last week, for example, HP announced that it would change its Adaptive Enterprise (AE) product strategy, Gartner noted in a brief sent to customers. Instead of pursuing the "high-cost, low-volume UDC [Utility Data Center], HP "will move toward a more modular strategy, with more individual products and services."