Grid Meter » Turn-key Transactional Web Apps on a Grid

December 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Turn-key Transactional Web Apps on a Grid

TAGS: None

Earlier this week I lauded the wonderful GRIDtoday special feature, Grid Gets Transactional. I keep going back to it as I think there are some really insightful observations, especially from Massimo Pezzini, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

I like the encapsulation of the definition of Grid 2.0 as an evolution from the HPC nature of Grid to one of a platform for transactional web applications.

The French pilot / author Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, "As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." And this GRIDtoday article introduces us to several companies that are indeed serving as the enablers for this evolution of Grid.

There is another company out there thinking along the same lines and taking it one step further to a complete hosted turn key solution, 3tera. I've mentioned them before in this blog but recently caught up with them for an interview in the Globus Consortium Journal.

The 3tera approach is called AppLogic, a "grid operating system" designed to run and scale transactional Web applications with a slick graphical drag and drop front end that the application architect can use to define the topology.

From the article:

We think the world is ready for a simpler way to run Web applications without having to think about all the hardware that actually is providing the horsepower to it.

Over the last ten to 15 years we have gone from using large SMP-based systems to using more commodity-based Intel and AMD-based servers. As a result, we've developed what some people have termed server sprawl. Instead of running an application on one server, we now run it on a distributed architecture of 20, 30, 60 or even more servers. And of course, there are some, like Google, that run on tens of thousands of servers.

We need a way to easily control applications that span physical resources, allowing people to stop managing hardware. That's what our grid operating system does. It is not an operating system in the sense of requiring people to write code specifically for it. Rather, it is an operating system in the sense that it abstracts and manages the distributed hardware grid and enables people to focus on their applications without having to make them "grid-aware".

In technical terms, AppLogic is a meta-operating system. It actually uses Linux within it. This allows people to run any Linux software they want on top of AppLogic without rewriting their code.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on December 14, 2006 08:39 AM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: