Grid surprise

As grid computing enters more enterprise environments, the buzz over the technology's potential never ceases. Once grids are installed, network executives find them useful for a far wider variety of applications than just computationally heavy ones. They also work well for applications that have high transactional volumes or are data intensive. And after sending those apps to the grid, it dawns on these early adopters that what they have is a giant, powerful - and comparatively inexpensive - next-generation generic application server.

"We have more than 700 nodes on our grid. Grid is our virtual application server that includes Windows, Linux and Solaris/Sun applications. We do have [dedicated] application servers, but our basic plan is to use the grid to provide a very viable alternative to expensive Sun platform boxes," says Robert Ortega, vice president of architecture and engineering for Wachovia, in Charlotte, N.C.

As it turns out, the "application" that a grid is almost innately suited to serve is none other than the industry's next-generation application itself - Web services .

"There's no point in moving an entire organization onto a service-oriented architecture , but host and provision those services in fixed, static [hardware] silos - where each application or service is run in its own separate environment, with its own personnel. If I'm going to marry my vision of loosely coupled services to an on-demand environment, I'm going to assume that the grid will allocate and provision [hardware] resources on demand as my service levels fluctuate," says Peter Lee, CEO of grid middleware vendor DataSynapse. "Grid is a very logical underpinning to achieve an SOA."

Ortega agrees. "Originally, the grid was only used for compute-intense applications, but now we're positioning it as a general-purpose transactional environment," he says.

Wachovia built its grid in 2002, using software from DataSynapse (a company in which Wachovia's venture unit has invested, according to Wachovia materials). Wachovia has been using the grid to crunch numbers for risk analysis, securities prices and other applications, and to crank out enormous reports - a 15-minute process that used to take 15 hours, Ortega says.

Last year, IT executives expanded use of the grid, evolving it into an SOA platform that runs various Web services. For instance, Wachovia runs what Ortega calls "transformation" Web services on the grid. These are transactional messages that must be converted from one format to another, or that call on an application rule. Ortega uses Web services as the middleware between APIs. A Web service is used, for example, when an application requires data to be converted into a Java JAR file or a Windows DDL. By using a Web service to do the conversions, data can be passed from one proprietary application to another without custom API work. And because Wachovia's systems can field some 5,000 transformation messages per second, the grid's nearly unlimited power makes such an application design feasible, Ortega says.