The business and technology benefits of grid computing are many and varied.
For businesses grid computing can:
Accelerate time to market
Grids help improve corporate productivity and collaboration.
Problems can be solved that were previously difficult or unsolvable.
Enable collaboration and promote operational flexibility
Grids bring together not only IT resources, but also end users, clients, suppliers, and other interested people.
Widely dispersed departments and businesses can create virtual organizations to share data and resources.
Efficiently scale to meet variable business demands
Grids create flexible, resilient operational infrastructures.
Rapid fluctuations in customer demand can be addressed—availability on demand is the result.
Instantaneous access to compute and data resources enables the business to "sense and respond" to needs.
Increase productivity
End users can get uninhibited access to the computing, data, and storage resources they need (when they need them).
Employees are equipped to move easily through product design phases, research projects, and more—faster than ever.
Leverage existing capital investments
Improve optimal utilization of computing capabilities.
Common pitfalls, such as over-provisioning and incurring excess costs, can be avoided.
IT organizations are freed from the burden of administering disparate, nonintegrated systems.
The overall IT total cost of ownership (TCO) is reduced.
Grid computing also provides the following technology benefits:
Infrastructure optimization
Consolidate workload management.
Provide capacity for high-demand applications.
Reduce cycle times.
Increased access to data and collaboration
Federate data and distribute it globally.
Support large multidisciplinary collaborations.
Enable collaboration across organizations and among businesses.
Resilient, highly available infrastructure
Balance workloads.
Foster business continuity.
Enable recovery and fail over.
Increase workload throughput significantly.
