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.