John Dix, editor in chief of Network World, moderates a panel discussion of leading vendors on how grid computing will affect the end-to-end network.

Participants:

• Cisco: Rob Redford, vice president, product and technology marketing
• HP: Michael Feinberg, vice president  and CTO of Network Storage Solutions
• IBM: David Martin, program director, Internet Standards and Technology
• Intel: Robert Fogel, director of Worldwide Grid Strategy and Business Development
• Nortel: Franco Travostino, director of Advanced Technology
• SAP: Alexander Gebhart, development manager, Netweaver Enterprise Grid Computing

Dix opening remarks: By many accounts, average system utilization across organizations is 15% to 20% today, while obviously the ideal would be around 80%. What’s more, some 20% of IS budgets go to operations, marginally less than the 25% earmarked for capital investments. We’ve created large, underutilized, complex environments that are costly to maintain. So there is a huge need to do this better, and the prevailing thinking at this point seems to be that grid is the answer.

And there is great opportunity because we have this confluence of developments:

• The maturation of grid technology
• General consensus that the future of computing is about networked, low-cost components
• And the emergence of service oriented architectures, or Web services .

The combination of these three elements seems to add up to a potent force, a sensible image of the future we can build toward.

What’s more, we have new applications on the horizon that will give us further impetus, one being efforts to instrument anything and everything of value - sensors in/on everything in every field, from medicine to military and manufacturing. This will create a flood of raw, real-time streaming data.  

For the purpose of our discussion here today, we’re talking about the big grid: As our Intel speaker so eloquently put it: “The grid spanning the enterprise and used to integrate, provision, virtualize and aggregate all enterprise resources including compute, communication, storage, apps and data.”

And we have a good cross- section of vendor speakers to address the grid issue, including representatives from companies selling network, software, systems, storage and processors.

Since advances in one sector always make possible advances in another - more powerful computers, for example, making it possible to develop more demanding software - as a starting point, let’s talk about what the power and flexibility of grids means to networks, applications, storage, etc.

Dix: Franco – starting with you on the network side – do bigger pipes answer all the grid challenges, or do networks take a radical turn somewhere down the road?

Travostino (Nortel): My opinion is that bigger pipes help, but they are not the ultimate solution. My mantra is that we do not want to adapt applications to the network, but rather we want to adapt the network to the applications. When we talk about grid, it’s not just about moving petabytes or terabytes around – it’s about adding intelligence so that the network can better understand the workflow.

Redford (Cisco): I agree with Franco. It’s not just about fat pipes. It’s very easy to look at the problem and say there needs to be lots of connectivity to move the data around to all these different places. But the role of the network is a little bit inconsequential because right now we need to be primarily focused on getting all these different pieces to fit together. If you look at how any tech evolves from early origin stage to the practical stage – you have to create separation and isolation to make the different parts work before you look at how they work together to solve a broader set of problems. It’s not just a matter of making it work, you have to make it work effectively.

Everyone talks about all these unused CPU cycles that need to be put to better use. But there is an even larger problem, and that’s complexity and cost. The operational costs are very high for any large enterprise today, and they’re seeking ways to simplify. Grid offers a great opportunity, but [it won’t fly unless] it makes it less expensive to operate, makes it simpler to program, because the cost of systems integration and programming fundamentally drive the economics of any business decision. If we can’t figure out a way to make that work, we won’t be able to get grid out of the academic world and move it into the business mainstream.

Dix: Robert, from the processor viewpoint, does Moore’s Law matter any more since you can scale by adding more processors?

Fogel (Intel): I believe so. We’ve traditionally looked at Moore’s Law primarily from a performance perspective. But it’s really beginning to make a substantial impact in convergence – that is, the ability to integrate more and more into the processor. That includes the ability to manage the other aspects of the infrastructure, and that includes the network. As Moore’s Law continues to evolve – and it appears it has a pretty distant horizon – the impact will primarily be on this integration factor and the convergence of various aspects of the infrastructure.

Dix: Mike, does the grid change the equation for storage-area networks?

Feinberg (HP): I want to take a step back and examine what the word "grid" means. I think the word is confusing. To my mind, when we talk about grid we’re talking about a common management interface, so you can actually understand the resources that are out there and utilize them in a systematic manner across the environment. The second part is the capabilities of grids.

If you think about grid and the architectures people deploy, they are implicitly talking about geographic distribution. So what would storage have to deliver as capabilities? I think that’s still virgin territory, still being developed. The grid community talks about data a fair amount, but the relationship between data and storage is somewhat cloudy. I also think we should think about the concepts and tenants of pooling, sharing resources, dynamic provisioning and security – that manifest themselves and how you build your own technology.

In HP’s storage division, we’ve incorporated our vision of HP Storage Works Grid. And this whole concept is to be able to lay that hardware down once and be able to reutilize that hardware to deliver new capabilities just in time.

Redford (Cisco): If you look at grid as a general abstraction mechanism – as a way of virtualizing lots of different resources – then the idea that you can ask a network for some storage or data, and it can figure out where it’s located and hand it to you, that’s a compelling idea. If you have to know explicitly where the data is and ask for it, it’s a lot more complicated to program. If the infrastructure and the middleware can give it to you regardless of where it is – via intelligence in the network, intelligence in the storage-area network and intelligence in the storage, working through middleware to provide that to you – that makes it a heck of a lot easier than each programmer having to worry about FTPing lots of data to different locations or having to be able to assemble the data needed to run they particular application.

Dix: Alexander, how might grid change enterprise applications?

Gebhart (SAP): At last year’s GlobusWorld somebody said the success of grid depends on how many grid-enabled applications we’ll see. Let me tell you a little bit about the challenges that arise when you try to grid-enable some parts of supply chain management applications or customer relationship management applications.

The first issue is the program decomposition – cutting the application into tiny pieces that can be executed in parallel. It sounds easy, but it’s quite a huge problem. The next challenge being encountered is deployment. What does the dynamic deployment look like? What does the installation look like? What does the dynamic customizing look like? How do we make sure we are in a perfect environment – that all the parts are there that we need for a specific application, that we have the right connections, the appropriate network bandwidth and so on.

Look at the end result, once the application has run on the grid, there is log data or tracing data residing on grid nodes. Since the grid node is empty prior to the execution of an application, it must be empty after the execution of the application, but the log files need to be somewhere. So this is also a major problem.

Even with the perfect infrastructure, infinite bandwidth and infinite storage, to grid-enable an application is a challenge. But the benefits are quite remarkable if this challenge is mastered somehow. The benefits for existing applications are an increase in the quality of results, and it will make possible new applications that we never thought possible due to the lack of resources available.