Interesting week in Athens (Greece) this week! Inspired by the temples of ancient gods & goddesses in the Greek capital, the Grid gurus reviewed and measured their progress for a pervasive adoption of Grid solutions at the 16th Global Grid Forum Symposium.

One major confirmation this week that came up at GGF16 is the joint announcement by GGF (Global Grid Forum) and the EGA (Enterprise Grid Alliance) that a non-binding LOI for the 2 organizations merger has been signed.

So just in case you have any doubts – I think this is good news. Why? Well for several reasons:

- Grid solutions are still often perceived as some kind mega-compute facility that is only leveraged by academia, a few public institutions and very few enterprises. Whilst this may have reflected a portion of the truth, this is no longer the case. There is an increasing amount of concrete industry projects which confirm that Grid is gaining momentum. Agreed – this is not main stream for the IT business as yet. Since EGA has mostly focused its efforts in readying Grid technologies & standards for datacenter level deployments and GGF sees its standards and architectures being adopted for projects that are clearly penetrating the enterprise space, it seems very reasonable and encouraging that the 2 organisations will join their forces rather than trying to impose different standards separately, creating opportunities for more confusion and chaos. Sometimes too many standards can kill the standards.

- Grid means (too) many things – it’s already a term overloaded by our favourite markengineers and it now points in too many directions. So much that the Grid solution providers might decide to not use the word Grid in the future but something else close to “Service-Oriented Utilities”. Both EGA & GGF offer interesting and converging view points for Grid and its future – a clear message (roadmap, use cases…) from a consolidated industry consortium will definitely help positioning and promoting the values of such solutions.

- There is tons of industry standards involved in Grid from many organisations (IETF, W3C, GGF, OASIS, DMTF…). So much that the Grid community has started to address interoperability issues, a recurring industry topic; so no surprise here. I see the GGF/EGA merger as a chance to focus on enterprise requirements to quickly adopt Grid-like solutions without some of the usual pitfalls that prevent the industry to fully benefit from new technologies. On the other hand the EGA will benefit from the experience of GGF in “Collaboration Grid” – i.e. the union of multiple Grids to do more – especially as Enterprise Grids and Collaboration Grids are gradually converging as it was rightly remarked by David Snelling of Fujitsu Labs in his keynote at GGF16. 

- What would help users to adopt Grid? The availability of their business applications on Grids and the ability to leverage Grid to address their business objectives – The service orientation of Grid is definitely a plus. The EGA community could help rallying additional application vendors to join and support Grid development efforts. The GGF links with initiatives such as NESSI in Europe will also help the merged organization to develop global Services Grids for businesses.

- Grid is a worldwide trend! I am amazed each time I hear these Grid project reports from Japan, China, Europe, US… All major world Research & Business areas have or are connected to one or more Grid projects. Many of these projects and Grid facilities are interconnected to explore many of the global facets of Grid, beyond the basic scalability requirements for compute power. Data distribution, data sharing are also amongst tackled objectives. The EGA/GGF merger means that more joint/cross development opportunities will be created between Research and the Industry.   

So this merger news is good news – but it does not mean that Grid is THE answer to all business & IT challenges… In fact there’s still a lot of work ahead to make Grid attractive enough for the industry – software licensing in Grid remains for example a major headache… So I guess the Service-Orientation debates in the IT industry will help determining a good enough path for the users – I might be too optimistic here. The world of Web-Services is haunted by many “discussions” between major software vendors including Microsoft, Sun, HP, IBM and many others to define and select WS standards. 

By the way – the storage community is also looking at Grid as the storage industry faces issues to scale and share data resource in a dynamic fashion… SNIA had a BoF session at GGF16 to start connecting with the Grid community which seems interested in SNIA’s efforts for defining Storage Grids.

It’s InteGRIDtion time!

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