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November 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Grid - The Sum of the Parts

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Long-time PC Magazine and InfoWorld editor Michael Miller has seen a lot in his twenty-plus years of journalism. This week, he announced he is moving on, and he took the opportunity to reminisce about all the progress he has seen since he started in the eighties.

But where does Miller think we are today? Miller's latest (and last?) column for PC Magazine offers the following conclusion: "In the world of business technology, 2006 was the Year of Virtualization."

I've been thinking recently about what 2006 represented for Grid technologies, too. Back in January I suggested that the coming year would be a make-or-break milestone for Grid. In the most recent edition of The Globus Consortium Journal , we put this proposition to some top analysts. There was plenty of disagreement, as the following excerpts demonstrate:

"I really agree. I think Grid is on the cusp. The promise of Grid has always been in the enterprise, and while we certainly see enterprise customers using Grid, the applications have been very traditional, in high-performance computing and parallel processing-places where it makes perfect sense."
- John Humphreys, IDC

"I don't agree, because I think Grid is already well established as a valuable tool that's used by any number of firms in financial services, manufacturing, life sciences, and on and on, for a growing number of applications. ... I believe Grid is losing its niche status as it continues to gain applicability. I just don't see any evidence that Grid is lacking some critical mass that could make it a make-or-break year."
- Carl Claunch, Gartner

One common thread in all of the interviews was the view that the future of Grid lies in a number of fields beyond traditional Grid computing. In retrospect, I think 2006 was the year that saw "a break" - but not in the sense of a bust. What we saw this last year was an incredible proliferation of many different Grid-derived technologies, including Grid 2.0. SOA, and, of course Virtualization. So Miller is onto something, I think, when he says that this last year was "The Year of Living Virtually." But that's not the whole story, because all of Grid's offspring are now coming into their own.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 20, 2006 08:51 AM

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