| In the last couple of years we have seen a tremendous commercial interest in Grid Computing solutions. These commercial aspects are centered on the concept of resource sharing and resource virtualization principles. Every computing resource including clusters, servers, blades, operating systems, and applications are viewed as utilities . The advancement of Grid Computing through the principles of open technologies, standard-based integration, and hardware and software technology maturity are behind these utility concepts. The key strategy areas of grid applicability in the commercial world are utility computing, resource virtualization, and on-demand computing. Some of the prominent technologies helping the commercial organizations in their vision are: -
Advancement of service-oriented architectures, in particular Web services, enables organizations to start working on interoperable software solutions -
Hardware virtualizations capabilities including clusters, blades, and so forth -
Software capabilities in resource management and provisioning including policy-driven architectures to meet quality of service, usage and accounting measurements, and so on -
Autonomic computing principles enable high availability of resources Some of the core concepts introduced by the major commercial organizations include Business On Demand solutions by IBM, the Utility computing and Data centers of HP, N1 technology initiative from Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft's '.Net' strategies. There are other organizations already playing a major role in Grid Computing infrastructure deployment. These participants include IBM Corporation, Avaki, Platform, and others. The emerging Grid Computing technologies, especially the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA), is playing a major role in the standardization of the activities in the grid space. We will see the details on these standards later on in this book. |
