Grid Meter » 451's William Fellows: Grids to Disappear Into Stack

January 23, 2006 | Comments: (0)

451's William Fellows: Grids to Disappear Into Stack

TAGS: None

The 451 Group's William Fellows is always good for a dose of reality around the evolution (or lack thereof, in certain areas) of enterprise Grid. The new issue of GRIDtoday includes a lengthy Q&A with Fellows - who calls out a number of specific challenges that remain for enterprise Grid computing adoption.

Fellows points out "the standards that do exist today are not relevant and there is no evidence that standards are being used in implementations or that any product is being built using them. If grids can find a place in one of the open source stacks, such as LAMP, it would undoubtedly help further adoption."

Last week, Peter Yared from ActiveGrid talked to Open Resource about the concept of a "lightweight architecture" as a big looming shift for enteprise application development. Yared defined a lightweight architecture as "running straightforward, usually open source, software stacks with service oriented API's on large clusters of commodity machines." This has been the preferred architecture for big Internet players like Google, Amazon and Yahoo - Yared says - and mainstream enterprise is starting to lean towards the model as well.

Grid computing is a complex animal, as are operating systems, web servers, scripting languages and databases. Yet still it is rather trivial to get the latter four, that comprise the LAMP stack, up and running for those with even a small amount of sysadmin knowledge. This is not the case with Grid. In many OS distributions one can simply pop a GUI, check a box, and presto, LAMP or major components thereof are up and running.

Like the electrical grid, from which Grid computing took it's namesake, success will be achieved when no one realizes that it is there, but causes quite the stir when there are interruptions in service.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 23, 2006 08:38 AM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: