April 8, 2005

Globally, awareness of grid computing is growing at a very rapid pace, according to analyst group Quocirca.

That data is based on studies conducted in the summer of 2004 and recently updated. While conducting its research, Quocirca learned that in Europe alone, awareness of grid computing has more than doubled in about 8 months.

Industry analyst Dale Vile of Quocirca says that grid awareness is also increasing across the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific region.

The growth of awareness doesn't correspond to adoption -- yet. "It's the usual lag with any emerging technology," says Vile. "There's engagement that hasn't in all cases turned into action."

That's because grid awareness hasn't fully spread past IT and into senior management channels. Veronique Anxolabehere, senior dir of technology marketing at Oracle (a sponsor of the Quocirca research), says that one solution is for vendors to "talk to C-level executives...C-level decision-makers must be aware of the benefits of grid computing."

Grid is one of those IT areas in which it is easy to drown in a sea of jargon and obscure the business value, but at heart it's a way to more cheaply and efficiently harness the power of existing IT resources like computers, servers, and storage by 'virtualizing' them into one system.

This means that, for any particular task, a company can end up using only what it needs and let the other resources of the grid lie dormant.

From a corporate perspective, this is cost efficient because it uses resources that have been bought to simulate a single system that, purchased separately or built up out of add-ons, would be more expensive, and which would be useless if not utilized for its purpose.

Meanwhile, grid components just go back to their old tasks when not being utilized for larger purposes).

It's a great value proposition, one that Oracle has flogged on various occasions, often citing cost savings to customers. Anxolabehere tells Line56 that one grid adopter, the Chicago Stock Exchange, has forecast a grid ROI of 171 percent over five years.

The good news is that Vile sees a correlation between awareness of grid and knowledge of benefits like these.

Also, he notes that companies interested in grid are also adopting services-oriented architectures (SOAs), which, in the software world, have a broadly similar approach to componentizing and virtualizing application usage and interfaces.

The time to move to grid, or, more ambitiously, to tackle a strategy simultaneously involving grid, SOA, and, say, blade server adoption, is before certain kinds of projects, concludes Vile. "It's as you go through an ERP [enterprise resource planning] application, call center, or Web-facing application," he says.

Source: Line 56