Grid adoption perks up

Mainstream companies start to reap benefits from harnessing unused computing power.

In the staid world of insurance companies, The Hartford is making a name for itself by lashing together 200 servers to create a powerful grid that's tackling compute-intensive financial analytics.

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In the staid world of insurance companies, The Hartford is making a name for itself by lashing together 200 servers to create a powerful grid that's tackling compute-intensive financial analytics.

"Grid has mainly been used for academia, but it is actually much more useful for corporate business," says Chris Brown, director of advanced technologies at Hartford Life. He says The Hartford had been running into scalability issues both in terms of hardware and software that could handle the company's growing needs.

The Hartford spent six months designing the grid network, grid-enabling its applications and deploying the Condor open source grid management software developed by the University of Wisconsin. The grid network went live in September.

Although Condor is free, Brown says The Hartford spent significant amounts of money on integration and software development. But Brown says the benefits are enormous.

The Hartford is the largest seller of variable annuities in the world. With a client base approaching 2 million, it needed computational horsepower to perform immense calculations to measure both behavior in the financial marketplace and market conditions themselves. The Condor-based system runs in excess of 100,000 analytical jobs each month.

"One of our main hedging calculations recently underwent a performance boost that reduced its runtime from about 10 hours to under 20 minutes,'' Brown says. Grid computing "allows us to now do things in near real-time that were previously run overnight, creating some great new opportunities for use of the technology."

Currently the grid consists of 200 rack-mounted, dual-processor servers, but Brown is now in the pilot stage of a project to add desktops to the grid.

While The Hartford estimates that it is saving millions of dollars through grid computing, there have been some unexpected costs, such as finding integrators and developers who were skilled in grid deployment.

Brown adds, "We are pretty proud of where we are with the adoption of the technology itself. We are seeing a big benefit from it."

The Hartford is at the leading edge of grid computing's transition from academics and research to enterprise data centers. "Most early adopters have long-term and far-reaching plans to extend their grid activities, from initial beachheads to multi-application and cross-organizational grids," says William Fellows, an analyst at The 451 Group.

But he adds that widespread enterprise adoption is still a ways out, for a variety of reasons. "Across different vertical markets we hear similar barriers and challenges to increased adoption with software licensing, organizational and cultural issues, and data management being most prominent."

License to kill

One of the inhibitors to grid going mainstream has been the licensing issue that has essentially plagued the technology from its inception. "For all of the potential benefits of grids, enterprise IT departments cannot afford to buy software licenses for every device in the grid, a necessity under current licensing schemes, since the grid, by nature, consumes resources dynamically," Fellows says.

Some grid users have been rather resourceful and have been able to skirt by the regulations by using in-house software, negotiating deals with vendors or paying premium licensing fees for a few, choice applications only. But those are the exceptions rather than the norm. Fellows sees the problem growing over time. He says, "As they evolve into using grids as a more mainstream technology, the restrictions of current licensing will become greater obstacles."

Fellows supports licensing models that are based on business objectives and take the nature of grids into account.