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January 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Breaking Grid Down

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In the December 2006 issue of my other outlet for creative writing, the Globus Consortium Journal, I referenced a prediction I made earlier in the year. In fact, in the November 2006 issue I was "called out" a bit on this prediction by the cadre of analysts we interviewed.

My prediction was that this was a make or break year for Grid. As a subscriber to the Michael Gold school of thought (Jeff Goldblum's character in the Big Chill), I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. Hence I was able to rationalize my way out of that prediction by saying that I still think it was a "break year", but not in the sense of a bust. What we saw over the past year, and this was reflected in our conversations with analysts and past Globus Consortium Journal contributors alike, was the breaking down of Grid, and a resulting proliferation of Grid's component technologies. Two specific technologies that were mentioned were virtualization and Grid as complex SOA conglomerates that run and scale transactional Web applications.

Well, it seems that there were a few folks out there who agreed with me.

As a big fan of William Fellows and Steve Wallage. They put it this way:

As grid technology gets absorbed into enterprise fabrics, it could become inseparable from technologies such as virtualization and service-oriented architectures (SOA) and the creation of enterprise utilities.

And, although I am wary of labeling that which is supposed to foster progress as a "disruptive technology", David Strom in InformationWeek includes Web Services and Server Virtualization among five disruptive technologies to watch in 2007.

Speaking of the latter, "virtualization" in and of itself is a technological buzz word that will also be undergoing some "break down" over the following year. In this IBM Developer Works article, M. Tim Jones does just that. If you find the term virtualization confusing, this article will certainly clear things up.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 3, 2007 12:19 PM

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