Grid Meter » Lack of consolidation in Grid standards concerns enterprise end users

December 12, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Lack of consolidation in Grid standards concerns enterprise end users

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GridTODAY kicked off this week's industry discussion with an op-ed that highlights emerging interoperability threats in enterprise Grid
computing environments. According to author Brooklin Gore, enterprise end users lose when Grid vendors fail to converge on common standards:

"How many distributed resources managers (DRMs) does an enterprise need? I argue one. But what happens when you deploy that nifty new Grid version of SAS? Well, no problem because that SAS implementation comes with Platform's Grid software. But what if you're already running a DataSynapse grid that has a perfectly fine DRM? Unfortunately, those two DRMs don't talk very well to each other. But they do both talk Globus. So, maybe you could have SAS schedule jobs with Platform and run those jobs on DataSynapse-managed resources through a Platform-to-Globus-to-DataSynapse gateway? Now, if that is your idea of fun, go for it. Personally, I'd rather see a minimal set of standards that ALL Grid software adheres to, eliminating the need for intermediate Grid gateways. Then, an enterprise grid manager could more easily configure multiple job schedulers to leverage resources managed by a single DRM."

Gore's battle cry for interoperable vendor Grid solutions is a reminder of the nascence of enterprise Grid adoption. And the Grid development community itself in 2005 has remained predominately academics / scientific. So beyond financial and pharma (two industries which, BTW, have much broader integration and interoperability issues than just those ushered in by Grid) -- there hasn't been enough actual Grid usage for vendors to evaluate and consolidate standards in the context of real-world enterprise experiences. Even in the financial and pharma verticals, the examples beyond compute grid cycle stealing are few and far between.

Would greater enterprise end user participation in Grid standards group be welcome? Absolutely. But today, Grid standards are being predominately played out by the groups that have the most expertise -- which are the research / science community, and the vendors that have been heavily investing in R&D for how Grid will fit into their broader product strategies.

Gore makes a good point that "SMTP and HTTP emerged as de facto standards providing 99.9 percent of what folks needed to make the Internet what it is today." I'd argue that of these, HTTP was the most influential as e-mail had been around for a few decades, with very limited use, before web browsing came along. I'd also point out that, in the case of this particular standard, is that it was application driven. People really didn't pay it a whole lot of attention until there were web browser applications up and running.

The enterprise Grid end user community hasn't really shown up at the party yet, and I don't see Grid standards consolidation accelerating until there is broader Grid usage (read "applications") in production environments.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on December 12, 2005 09:42 AM

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