Here is a set of buzz-words and acronym that have been over-hyped and often used out-of-context by IT industry “wonderfullists”. So using them together may look like an odd move. However, there seem to be some emerging and interesting convergence points (say synergy if you want) between these domains or at least some complementariness. Here’s a quick overview of how they could play together:

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is a popular methodology that uses standards such as Web Services, which allows organisation to build more flexible IT infrastructures that respond more adequately to changing business needs.

SOA’s are considered by many industry experts and by an increasing number of IT users that it allows a better tie between business processes and IT whilst introducing greater flexibility and agility as to how Enterprises applications can respond to changing requirements at a business domain level. This is enabled by SOA re-designed applications based on re-usable modules matching business process components. On the technical side, more flexibility is gained by a looser coupling of resources required to run autonomous services. More transparency is also enabled as services and required resources get identified and accessed with less location restrictions.   

Grid, first adopted for performance-demanding scientific applications in its compute oriented form, is increasingly thought as a generic architecture model to provision, on-demand, virtualized IT resources (application, compute power, data, network, storage…) inside and across Business/IT domains in order to execute an IT function. New Grids are also leveraging Web-Services.

Several IT experts and IT users have started to highlight the convergence points between SOA and Grid. Alan Goldstein
– Managing Director, Head of Technology for the Bank of New-York – was stressing earlier on this year in a BankTech article that “In the area of SOAs, the grid is the ideal platform on which to execute services because of its ability to virtualize the actual execution of the service away from the physical host on which the service is to be executed.”. Other industry Grid experts also explain that both SOA and Grid are architectural styles that support service-orientation, one for business processes and applications and the other one for the infrastructure (e.g. GridToday article with Matt Haynos). Many SOA and Grid articles point at the Web-Services layers has been the crucial tactical stack to get IT clients connected to Grid Middleware and SOA applications modules. No doubts that the security layers of Web-Services will play an important role in the success of Grids and SOA. The Oracle Grid Index also shows common adoption trends between SOA and Grid by early adopters across geographies and business verticals.

So where’s storage in this newly defined IT space? Networked Storage solutions, made of small or big iron, network gears and management software, are designed to improve the overall management of storage resources. As a result storage networking solutions are now at the heart of most data centres, allowing optimised storage resource utilisation and data
protection policies, commonly taking care of mission critical applications data repositories. So what? Well talking to IT experts and IT users that have experienced the deployment of Grid, I hear that their common headache is about data and storage resource management in Grid. If even if several vendors have optimised the use of storage resources for their own Grid applications, there is a lack of coordination and specification to allow Grid management standards (e.g. GGF OGSA [pdf]) and data storage management standards to leverage each other. This is very much amplified in a heterogeneous environment. As mentioned in a previous blog, SNIA has started an initiative to start exploring the gaps between data storage and Grid management standards to address these issues. As part of a response to SNIA’s interests in Grid, the Open Grid Forum (OGF) has launched a new Storage Networking Community Group to help addressing common Grid and Storage industry priorities. SOA adopters are also asking for Enterprise data management solutions and best practises adapted to their services environments. If application and service executions are distributed dynamically, information & data access will need to “follow” the execution & distribution model in order to reach the management efficiency level required for each application. Combined and/or coordinated grid and data storage management can possibly start addressing SOA adopters’ data management challenges if they become well enough integrated to avoid any on-going
compatibility or lack of content issues.

So whilst SOA and Grid adoption rates are still relatively lower than many be of you would expect (from 0 to approximately 20%) with significant differences between verticals and geographies (e.g. in the Oracle Grid Index), these complementary architectures will very likely penetrate data centres as more flexibility and business alignment get imposed on IT by business & finances managers. So data storage solutions and standards need to evolve to address such data centre transformations. But we need more detailed requirements to understand the technology development directions precisely… this is why I will be talking about this exciting subject on behalf of SNIA at SNW Europe and SNW Australia in September! I hope to see you there!

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