Knowledge Center: Different Shades of Grid

Computerworld - As with most nascent enterprise technologies, early discussions around grid have focused primarily on how it will affect large system vendors' business models. While it will be interesting to watch IBM's and Sun's "grid as a commodity" strategies progress, let's not forget that the utility computing business model is far from the full extent of the grid discussion.
The future is not just about huge brokers outsourcing grid for core IT operations. If we think about a continuum in which companies are either grid brokers or grid consumers, there are -- pardon the pun -- many shades of grid in between.
One area that will be particularly interesting to watch is how enterprise service providers incorporate grid into their production environments, thereby extending the benefits of grid to their customers via their products and services. For this column, I spoke with three providers (each serving a different industry) and learned how they have incorporated grid into their production environments.
Acxiom
Little Rock, Ark.-based Acxiom Corp. provides systems and services to organizations that need to process and analyze massive amounts of data quickly and accurately. In 2000, Acxiom faced a significant scale issue when sales suddenly spiked around its data integration application AbiliTec, which ran on large Unix systems.
"We were having tremendous growth not only in the amount of customers, but in the number of files and records they wanted to run through the AbiliTec application," said Terry Talley, chief architect for Acxiom's products and infrastructure technology group.
In order to scale their production environment, Acxiom needed very large memory space and a lot of additional processors. "But we realized that financially, it didn't make sense to scale by adding an arbitrary number of expensive SMPs [symmetric multiprocessors]," said Talley. "The only way to go was commodity boxes."
The company replaced SMPs with Linux nodes with dual CPUs (typically in the 3-GHz range) and 4GB of RAM. The company also realized early on that it would need some way to manage this environment. After surveying available commercial management tools, it decided instead to build its own management console, which it dubbed "Apiary." The results obtained with this homegrown grid have been impressive.
"Historically, when we ran our software on conventional platforms, we'd jump through hoops to get a 5% gain in performance on a particular application," said Alex Dietz, CIO at Acxiom. "With grid, we go 10 times faster, and we could go 100 times faster, if we decided to. The incremental scalability of grid blows your mind."
Today, Apiary manages