Grid Meter » Eyes on EMC's Grid Computing Efforts in '06

January 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Eyes on EMC's Grid Computing Efforts in '06

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Yesterday's acquisition of Acxiom's Grid software by EMC was perhaps a harbinger of other big EMC Grid announcements to come in '06.

Acxiom's home-grown Grid software has been the envy of other data processing vendors, and the Grid community has a high opinion of the talents of Acxiom's Terry Talley (chief architect) and Alex Dietz (CIO). While they've secured remarkable results with their Grid over the last few years, they've been relatively quiet about the intricacies of how it works, because of the competitive advantage it brings to the organization. But the performance has been impressive.

"Historically, when we ran our software on conventional platforms, we'd jump through hoops to get a 5% gain in performance on a particular application," said Alex Dietz, CIO at Acxiom, in an interview with Ian Foster last year. "With [our] grid, we go 10 times faster, and we could go 100 times faster, if we decided to. The incremental scalability of grid blows your mind."

But the Acxiom partnership is just one of many reasons why the Grid community is really interested in EMC's Grid efforts in 2006.

For starters, as Grid technology evolves, the industry is moving away from mere compute Grids, and towards data Grids -- where data virtualization and storage challenges could escalate EMC to one of the key outspoken players for the industry.

Pushing on Grid directions is also a way for EMC to stay competitive with IBM. The rivalry between the two was well-documented in '05. Network-Attached Storage was one of the key areas in which these two vendors battled, and for the Grid community, the issue of coordinated data sharing (including navigating firewalls and pulling data out of storage devices at the edge) is another frontier area for the industry that will see a lot of activity in 2006.

EMC's had some interesting personnel additions over the last couple of years that make it clear they're serious about Grid. Ian Baird (from Platform) is the company's CTO for Grid and Utility Computing Solutions. Jeff Nick (former on demand heavy hitter from IBM) is the company's CTO. EMC isn't a company that's just fashionably turning up the dial on Grid for PR purposes -- they're in it for the long haul.

And another critical reason why EMC will be fascinating to watch in Grid discussions in '06 is their ownership of VMWare.

There's currently a considerable work going on in the open source Grid community (i.e., within the Globus Alliance) to facilitate virtual machines in Grid computing environments.

The first step of the virtualization evolution was on a single box -- on an SMP, for example. Today, a lot of enterprise is using virtualization to manage a cluster of virtual machines. The next stage is figuring out all of the workload, data distribution and security issues that will allow virtualization to become participant across enterprise Grids. This is more challenging than when they're just homogenized away inside a single cluster with a single file system and a single interconnect.

One of the areas where virtual machines are known to be weak is in handling a lot of I/O (disk or network I/O). Performance issues arise for VMs in I/O-heavy scenarios, and they just don't tend to behave as consistently as they do on bare hardware. But VM's in a Grid will have a very specific requirement for highly optimized I/O -- so this should be an interesting evolution area for virtual machines in '06 and beyond, and EMC is in a great position to lead the industry with VMWare.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 6, 2006 07:51 AM

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