Grid Meter » September 2006

September 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)

All Ready for Grid 2.0?

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We are a society that is seemingly obsessed with putting labels or signs on everything from car bumpers to blimps to items that exist only as ones and zeros in the ether. Case in point, an interesting piece by William Fellows of The 451 Group on Grid 2.0.

William defines the Grid versions as follows: Grid 1.0 is principally concerned with the virtualization, aggregation and sharing of compute resources, Grid 2.0 is focused on the virtualization, aggregation and sharing of all compute, storage, network and data resources. It is both service-oriented -- uses Web services and provides access to IT as a service -- and automated.

Okay. I get it and I buy it. Grid 2.0, even though it is really just a marketing term today adds storage network and data resources management to the services provided in Grid 1.0. Fine.

From the report "When asked, 70 percent of early adopters who responded to a survey said there is a better term than 'Grid' to describe their distributed computing architectures: 23 percent said virtualization, 23 percent said HPC, 19 percent said utility computing, 19 percent said clustering, and 15 percent said SOA."

So, if 70 percent of people surveyed by one of the leading analyst firms in the space do not believe that the term 'Grid' suffices - are we really ready for Grid 2.0?

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on September 29, 2006 06:50 AM

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

September 07, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Grid - Where to Start

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IBM Developer Works has posted a great primer for those new to Grid Computing. It struck me as very fortuitous that this should come out so close to the start of the GridWorld conference. For those who are looking for some pre-conference reading to help familiarize themselves with the terms and techniques of Grid Computing, this is a perfect place to start. It is also a pretty good refresher course for those coming back to "Grid school" after a long summer holiday.

Now for a bit of shameless Globus self promotion...

From the IBM Developer Works article:

To build a grid today, a good place to start is to download the Globus Toolkit. Developed by The Globus Project, a research and development project that focuses on enabling the application of grid concepts to scientific and engineering computing, the tool kit is a set of services and software libraries designed to support grids and grid applications.

I be remiss if I didn't mention that there will be a plethora of Globus content at GridWorld this year, including technical sessions and hands on labs for those that really want to get started and do some real work.

I'd also like to point out the Globus Toolkit Compute Grid Tutorial recently posted by the Globus Consortium and the Globus Toolkit Presentations and Tutorials page posted by the Globus Alliance.

Globus or otherwise, I am pleased to see things like this IBM Developer Works article and the great content lined up next week at GridWorld. These are the critical first steps on the journey down the Grid path.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on September 7, 2006 09:07 AM