I could not resist attending the GridWorld event in Washington earlier this month. Not only this was an opportunity to meet with the passionate members of the Open Grid Forum (OGF was formed after the merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance) but GridWorld was also a venue to meet with Grid users and Grid solutions implementers.

There are still many debates about what Grid stands for. You might like the background information given by Wikipedia. I quite like what the EGA (now OGF) came up with for Enterprise Grid in their reference model document: “An enterprise grid is a collection of interconnected (networked) grid components under the control of a grid management entity”; it’s a simple definition with in mind the development of managed architectures that aggregate the IT resources of data centres aligned with a business into dynamically assignable pools.

But quite often when I discuss Grid technology and products, I get the odd look and comment: “Grid is a dream… it’s only for research and guys in academia“. Whilst I would agree that Grid has been much over-hyped about its potential and maturity for data centres, this conference in Washington clearly confirmed that Grid has already a foot in the Enterprise. The testimonial from Paul Strong at eBay during the conference was particularly eloquent. With a very large (and growing) IT environment where many resource tiers are always improved or upgraded, managing access to ever-scaling web-transaction repositories from multiple distributed applications for millions of users worldwide is not an easy task. In such dynamic IT configuration, a Grid architecture will help coordinating and managing the overall job executions and resource utilisation across application domains. And eBay is convinced that they can develop their own platform in order to do this. EBay’s example is just another way of highlighting the impact of grid infrastructures on IT in general as noted by Dr Carolino/Venturini/Warner when they wrote that “as the data processing demands of grid computing grow, it is important that the grid community understand the impact of grids on the enterprise network and other components“.

The other good sign at GridWorld was sent by IT vendors themselves. This is always encouraging for the not-yet-converted IT users to see large IT vendors embracing specific technologies and architectures for their own business. This is exactly what Intel, AMD and Oracle portrayed in Washington. Another encouraging sign is the multiplication of companies directly involved in the development and distribution of Grid middleware and related software. However this is also raising an important point mentioned by almost all communities represented at GridWorld: the need for Grid standards is higher than never. As Grid solutions get rolled in data centres, the lack of standardised interfaces in Grid means that it will take some efforts by IT vendors and users to put them in place later on whether this is for managing or supplying services. The danger here is to recreate a different type of silo.

There’s obviously hope that the newly formed OGF will help addressing these issues for the Enterprise whilst continuing its collaboration with the research community. On the data storage front in OGF, a new community group called “StorageNetworking” (SN-CG) was launched during the OGF symposium to start addressing the need for Enterprise
data storage management systems and Grid to interoperate and leverage each other’s capabilities.      

So much to do in Grid and so little time! So maybe Grid is a dream… let’s make sure it does not become a nightmare for IT users.

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