Grids get down to business

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from specialized provider DataSynapse to host a new set of corporate banking applications.

Rather than have a dedicated set of servers, the applications seek out unused computing power from financial traders' workstations. If a machine is not used for a certain amount of time, the grid server software will offload a job to it. Once the workstation is used again, the job is moved to another free machine.

The set-up allowed Wachovia to avoid buying costly new hardware for these services, said Robert Ortega, vice president of architecture and engineering at Wachovia. The company was able to avoid buying eight Sun Fire 15K servers, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each and require dedicated staff to maintain.

"We are now leveraging the grid platform in scenarios that would have been considered traditional transaction processing, such as creating a trade or retrieving market data," Ortega said.

Ortega noted a few challenges for grid computing, such as software licensing schemes designed for software that runs on a single machine.

Other challenges include the lack of grid-ready packaged applications and the lack of common charge-back methods for pricing computing services.

Assurances of security and reliability of computing grids are also required before people will be willing to share the servers and storage owned by an individual company department.

Indeed, some of the biggest challenges facing the adoption of grids have more to do with people. Unlike academia, departments within large corporations are not accustomed to sharing their hardware resources or data with other groups.

"People don't want to share," said Wolfgang Gentzsch, managing director of MCNC, a nonprofit that's built a large grid serving governments, universities and others in North Carolina. Gentzsch led Sun's grid engineering efforts until last year.

"It's almost like we know how to handle the technology," said Gentzsch. "But the cultural issues, that's a big change."

[Thomas, David]

What about XGrid???

I think this is the third or fourth article I have read from CNET
about Grid computing. I have one burning question as a result.
Why haven't these articles mentioned XGrid.

Apple is shipping Grid computing capabilities in Tiger. Topping
that off, as before, you receive a complete development
environment with documentation. I am amazed that you could
put so much attention on the future of a promising technology
but fail to mention a new arrival in that arena. An arrival, not
full of promises to be, but an arrival that puts the tools directly
into the hands of developers and users today.