GridWorld: Panelists weigh grid's promise, obstacles

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Grid technology once reserved for high-end research centers is making its way into more enterprises, though plenty of obstacles to wider adoption remain.

This is according to a panel of vendors gathered to address the impact of grid computing on business at the GridWorld conference held in Washington, D.C., this week. Online auctioneer eBay, which exploits a massive computing grid to power its site, is one an example of a successful implementation and was the topic of a Tuesday keynote at the conference.

Acknowledging that grids aren’t appropriate for every application a company runs, Ken King, vice president of grid computing with IBM, said the technology is becoming more mainstream.

“To me mainstream means something is used in [a company’s] core data center for mission-critical applications, things that are core to revenue-generating aspects of business," he said. “We are just starting to see aspects of grid move into that."

But that point at which companies attempt to expand their use of grid computing is also where they often run into headaches, said another panelist.

“Often grids just don’t get used to the degree promised, therefore they can’t achieve enterprise adoption" or the expected ROI, said Dan Hushon, chief technologist with EMC.

Some hurdles to wider adoption are what IBM’s King called “perceived inhibitors," such as the belief that the IT department has to give over ownership of grid projects to the business units – but still carry the expense on the IT budget – and security concerns.

“Companies have to deal with getting over those types of perceptions they have because it’s grid, really it’s not different" than adopting other new technologies in the past, he said.

Of course there are companies for which grid computing makes perfect sense, such as eBay. The online auction Web site began putting together a grid infrastructure about five years ago, says Paul Strong, a distinguished research scientist at eBay. The site’s fast-growing user base and huge catalog of items for sale made the flexibility and agility of grid computing particularly attractive.

Grid computing was an obvious choice because “there was no way the existing technology would scale,” said Strong, who has been with eBay for about a year and gave a keynote presentation at GridWorld. The company decided to abstract its databases and scaled them, building a “primordial grid,” he said.

Currently eBay has more than 15,000 servers in its production environment and uses a grid made up of about 350 Windows, Linux and Solaris computers, he said. It takes the site about 20 minutes to update with new features, and on average the company adds 300 new features to the site per quarter, Strong said.

It’s not possible to simply buy a grid, said both Strong and the vendor panelists; instead a grid infrastructure must be built. But if companies begin thinking of their data centers as grids and treating them accordingly, they can rather easily start taking advantage of the benefits.