Server platforms Toolkit

Grids set for enterprise push

Martin LaMonica CNET News

Published: 28 Apr 2005 18:20 BST

Using the software, corporate customers will be able to make better use of their existing computing resources, according to Globus Alliance executives. Often, servers or databases are substantially underused because these resources are usually purchased to serve one specific application, rather than be shared by many.

The EGA, meanwhile, has a broader mission. The group's multiyear plan is to accelerate usage of grid computing, help define where it is effective, and promote standards.

"There aren't many people taking the big picture on grid," said Peter Ffoulkes, director of marketing of high-performance and technical computing at Sun, which is a member of the EGA. "This isn't some academic group that's trying to boil the ocean."

"Shared resources"
Early examples show that grids are a compelling way to save money on hardware, though they're still for the technologically adventurous.

Financial services company Wachovia, for instance, used grid software rom specialised provider DataSynapse to host a new set of corporate banking applications.

Rather than have a dedicated set of servers, the applications seek out unused computing power from financial traders' workstations. If a machine is not used for a certain amount of time, the grid server software will offload a job to it. Once the workstation is used again, the job is moved to another free machine.

The set-up allowed Wachovia to avoid buying costly new hardware for these services, said Robert Ortega, vice-president of architecture and engineering at Wachovia. The company was able to avoid buying eight Sun Fire 15K servers, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each and require dedicated staff to maintain.

"We are now leveraging the grid platform in scenarios that would have been considered traditional transaction processing, such as creating a trade or retrieving market data," Ortega said.

Ortega noted a few challenges for grid computing, such as software licensing schemes designed for software that runs on a single machine.

Other challenges include the lack of grid-ready packaged applications and the lack of common charge-back methods for pricing computing services.

Assurances of security and reliability of computing grids are also required before people will be willing to share the servers and storage owned by an individual company department.

Indeed, some of the biggest challenges facing the adoption of grids have more to do with people. Unlike academia, departments within large corporations are not accustomed to sharing their hardware resources or data with other groups.

"People don't want to share," said Wolfgang Gentzsch, managing director of MCNC, a nonprofit that's built a large grid serving governments, universities and others in North Carolina. Gentzsch led Sun's grid engineering efforts until last year.

"It's almost like we know how to handle the technology," said Gentzsch. "But the cultural issues, that's a big change."