Or distributed computing.Does the RIAA know about this?
IBM Corp yesterday announced ten new grid computing initiatives that are
the culmination of six months of marketing and partnering work after the
establishment of a cross-divisional organization last June that handles all
development, alliances, marketing, strategy, and sales for grid
technologies within IBM, writes Timothy Prickett Morgan.
The initiatives target potential customers in precise niche markets where
grid technology is being embraced by early adopters. For each niche, IBM
has put together a complete offering, including open source software
technologies, its hardware and middleware, and products from dominant third
party grid computing experts who have been in this market longer than Big
Blue.
IBM, ever keen on making money by fostering new markets that will generate
a big services business, has spent the last six months trying to get grid
computing from its academic and research organization nursery out into the
larger commercial data processing and collaboration market because it is
here that grid computing can help IBM push its hardware, software, and
services, and if it is lucky, make a few billion dollars in sales in the
next couple of years.
As part of the initiatives, IBM has signed master partner agreements with
Platform Computing, the Toronto-based vendor of platform-agnostic grid
middleware that is one of the early pioneers of the idea, and DataSynapse,
a New York-based grid specialist in the financial services market.
IBM has also announced alliances with Avaki, Entropia, and United Devices,
who provide middleware in the grid market. IBM's grid offerings also lean
heavily on the open source Globus toolkit for building grids and the Linux
environment. IBM is pushing grids based on its xSeries servers running
Linux and its pSeries servers running AIX.
White Space
Grid computing seeks to lash machines together -whether they are within a
single facility or scattered around the world - in such a way that massive
sharing of data and processing capacity is possible. Grid computing also
seeks to make use of unused processing cycles on desktops and workstations,
which Dan Powers, vice president of grid strategy at IBM, calls "white
space." This is a good term for this excess capacity, and it is the first
time we've heard it referred to in this manner.
IBM is keen on stimulating this new grid market, even though the
next-generation of the Globus toolkit, version 3.0, is now only in the
alpha phase. Globus Toolkit 3.0 will be the first platform to implement the
so-called Open Services Grid Architecture, which marries the grid
architecture to the idea of Web services.
Tom Hawk, general manager of the IBM grid organization, was adamant that
grid computing is not a future technology, that it is here today, and in
the market niches that IBM has chosen to target, this seems to be the case.
But for general businesses, these initiatives, as well as those put
together by IBM's competitors to chase the grid market, are just the test
beds for what grid computing might be.
Discount brokerage house Charles Schwab, which is a big IBM mainframe and
Unix server shop, was rolled out as an example customer for the new
initiatives.
Schwab has set up a grid that lashes together xSeries servers running Linux
and a version of the AIX LoadLeveler grid scheduling program that IBM
Research has ported to Linux (but which is not yet commercially available)
and a task scheduling program that IBM Research calls Tags that rides on
top of Globus.
This grid has allowed a financial services application that runs on this
cluster of machines in the company's San Francisco data center to do its
work more efficiently and therefore cut down on the processing time for
this application from four minutes to 15 seconds. While shaving transaction
times down by a few minutes may not be a big deal in Peoria, in the
financial services world, this can be the difference between making some
money and making a lot of money.
Grid Unlock
For 2003, IBM is focusing on five different markets with its grid initiatives.
IBM is offering an enterprise optimization bundle and a business analytics
bundle and for the financial services market. The enterprise optimization
bundle is akin to what Schwab has implemented, which seeks to improve the
flexibility and efficiency of the existing IT infrastructure by connecting
machines and applications through grid technology. The analytics grid aims
to pump up the accuracy and speed of the statistics that drive financial
transactions so companies can make decisions faster; it also aims to make
IT systems more resilient, which is problematic since financial systems
have long since been distributed across many distant and incompatible
machines. This is a perfect environment for grid computing.
IBM is offering a similar analytics grid offering for the life sciences,
and an information accessibility grid that also seeks to make the exchange
and querying of data in non-standard formats more efficient.
A similar information access grid offering is being packaged up for
government customers.
IBM has targeted two different grid bundles at the automotive and aerospace
industries, one each for engineering and design collaboration.
In addition, IBM has also established a grid implementation workshop for
companies who want to check out this new technology, and has set up grid
implementation centers in Montpelier, France, Nakahari, Japan,
Poughkeepsie, New York, and Santa Teresa, California.
IBM is bringing all of these different technologies together, says Powers,
because "customers want commercial products with support since they cannot
got to the open source community to get support." IBM wants to be the
throat to choke in grid deals, which is how IBM Global Services makes its
money a lot of the time.
� ComputerWire
http://212.100.234.54/content/61/29060.html
One mans white noise is anothers white light,white heat.
