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Grid poised for prime time
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September 29, 2004 (Computerworld) -- It's hard to believe that it's been almost a decade since I-Way, the first large-scale grid experiment.
For those of us who were there at the genesis of the technology, it's been exciting to see more frequent grid-focused articles in IT trade publications as pilot projects are rolled out on a commercial scale. From implementations by major financial institutions such as Charles Schwab and J.P. Morgan, to equally intriguing grid efforts by companies such as Burlington Coat Factory and GlobeXplorer, we're at the onset of the enterprise adoption curve. These are indeed interesting times.
But early commercial grid discussions have been distracted by the onslaught of marketing hype around the category. Part of the difficulty is that the term grid is being adopted to label a whole range of things to manage the familiar bugaboos of cost and complexity, such as virtualization, clustering and better management of IT resources. Vendors are finding it convenient to use grid as a term to describe the common themes at play.
I don't want to use this first column to belabor the real definition of grid; you can find my definition in "What Is the Grid?" (download PDF). To me, the more productive conversation is the role of open standards and open-source in the early evolution of enterprise grid.
Yes, there already are and will continue to be some interesting proprietary products built on grid technology, but we shouldn't lose sight of the importance of standardization and creating a foundation that end users can build upon to realize grid and virtualization on an enterprise scale. It's not clear that you're going to get there by buying a proprietary solution, even if it's dressed up in a nice grid marketing package.
Grid is, on many levels, a glorified interoperability discussion. It's about making heterogeneous resources play nicely together, synchronized to meet business needs. That notion has been highlighted in vendor marketing material to the point of becoming trite, but the real promised land of grid isn't just interoperability but integration among resources -- and across geographic barriers -- within an organization. (Ultimately, I also expect it to enable integration between organizations, as is already common in the sciences. But we need to walk before we can run.)
The key to this progression is to start looking at your IT infrastructure not as a collection of proprietary boxes, but rather as a set of services. Then you can start doing dynamic provisioning of those services and thinking in terms of the autonomic directions that IBM has been vocal about. Given some time, grid can become the underlying infrastructure that enables service-oriented architectures, virtualization, utility computing and a number of other common visions that you're hearing so much about.
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