Grid Meter » eBay, Grids and Standards

September 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)

eBay, Grids and Standards

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I have talked extensively in the past about the need to be able to point to real-world applications of Grid technologies. Well, here's one in production use at a company you may have heard of - eBay.

From the article:

"EBay Inc. is using grid computing to deliver online auction services to millions of users. Paul Strong, the company's distinguished research scientist, said the biggest technology issue facing eBay is managing its shared grid infrastructure, which is spread across more than 15,000 servers. Instead of managing individual servers, eBay wants its systems administrators to manage aggregations of servers, a process that would be eased considerably with grid standards."

The issue once Grid is ingrained and growing within the data center is that the lack of standards hurts over time. So, grid becomes a victim of its success. Boy it's cool and it helps our business run but without standards supported and delivered, how can I keep it in my data center. This reminds me of the early days of Linux where data center managers would tell me that yes it's cool but it will never be in my data center because it's not secure, it's not standards driven, and there is no one person to provide support for it or to go yell at. The reality of those early Linux days was that Linux was already in their data centers and (amazingly) they didn't know about it or (more likely) knew about it but didn't want to publicly admit it. I see good things here for Grid as we have major public companies like eBay saying that yes not only do they use Grid technologies, it's in production and this is what we need to have happen for it to stay in production.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on September 28, 2006 11:21 AM

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