Grid computing newcomer touts open source approach

A start-up is promising to help companies improve the performance of transaction-heavy Internet storefronts by transferring their applications to inexpensive Linux servers.

Named ActiveGrid , the company was founded by Sun and HP alums and received $3 million in funding from venture firms Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Allegis Capital this past summer.

The company emerged from stealth mode in the fall and plans to make its first product - an open source development environment - available in the next month.

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A start-up is promising to help companies improve the performance of transaction-heavy Internet storefronts by transferring their applications to inexpensive Linux servers.

Named ActiveGrid , the company was founded by Sun and HP alums and received $3 million in funding from venture firms Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Allegis Capital this past summer.

The company emerged from stealth mode in the fall and plans to make its first product - an open source development environment - available in the next month.

Peter Yared, former CTO at Sun for the standards-based single sign-on Liberty Alliance effort and Sun's application server division, says he partnered with Liberty Alliance founder Jeff Veis to bring companies a more cost-effective approach to develop and deploy Web services, specifically applications that must scale to handle thousands or even millions of transactions.

"Back then we were strongly oriented, and the customers were as well, toward smaller clusters of higher-end machines - four-, eight-, 16-way machines in clusters of four to eight. Very expensive hardware," he says. "One thing I noticed was this transition toward grid computing, this affinity towards running on large clusters of small, cheap, disposable Linux machines."

ActiveGrid bases its products on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, Python PHP), which is an open source alternative to Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Microsoft's .Net architectures for building and running dynamic Web sites.

The trouble has been that J2EE applications are not designed to run across a large number of servers, Yared says. In addition, J2EE applications are complex and, as a result, companies typically must offer one-size-fits-all service to customers on the Web.

ActiveGrid takes the load off of the back-end databases in a three-tiered data center architecture by enabling transactions to happen in the grid, Veis says. Because it is an XML-based development and deployment environment, applications can be dynamically altered on ActiveGrid to serve up specific information according to who is requesting it.

For example, a company that updates pricing information only once a month could cache pricing data in the grid,which eliminates the need to go back to database servers.

The approach is similar to architectures used by Google and Amazon, which both created custom deployments. ActiveGrid aims to bring that kind of grid technology to the masses.

Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, says ActiveGrid provides "an interesting alternative" in the application server market, which typically requires big multiprocessor boxes to generate the front end for transaction heavy Web sites.

"ActiveGrid adds another layer of flexibility and power to your Web applications," she says. "You can offload all the dynamic page generation [from your back-end servers] and because you've got ActiveGrid underneath it, it will scale to match your requirements. You can use a Linux farm or blades to do the generation of the Web pages."