CBR - ORACLE GRID SERIES

It is now two years since Oracle unveiled its claim to grid computing at its 2003 OracleWorld event with the launch of its 10g product portfolio, described by executive VP Chuck Phillips as a "milestone" for Oracle and the industry.

While the company's aggressive applications acquisition strategy has since then hogged the headlines, Oracle has continued with its quest to bring grid computing from the realms of academia to enterprise IT environments, helping to take grid computing beyond the hype to deliver tangible enterprise business benefits, according to the company's VP of technology, EMEA, Andrew Sutherland.

Oracle was certainly not the first company to pick up on grid computing - it had been used in theory and in practice in research and academia for some time, while the likes of HP, IBM and Sun had adopted grid technologies to drive their on-demand and utility initiatives - but it was one of the first major software vendors to commit to grid-enabling its products.

This was an important step in the realisation of grid computing as it helped to fulfil the promise of abstracting enterprise software resources, such as database and application server technologies, from the underlying hardware, and coincided with increased enterprise interest in the potential benefits of grid.

"The ideas behind grid had been floated around in academia for a very long time," says Sutherland of the seeds for the Oracle grid initiative. "What really came together was a real mixture of supply and demand."

On the supply side, the delivery of low-cost commodity servers and interconnect technologies, as well as the Linux operating system, was driving attitudes towards a distributed systems approach to enterprise computing. While on the demand side, restricted IT budgets meant that greater emphasis was beginning to be placed on the efficiency of IT and improving the utilisation of existing resources.

"It all came together, and it made the time for grid materialise," says Sutherland, citing the trends that prompted Oracle's decision to enable its infrastructure software to run virtualised over a grid of computing resources, making the most efficient use of available computing power as and when applications required it.

Like many new IT initiatives, grid computing suffered from its fair share of hype, not least because of the tendency of reporters and academics to take a science fiction-fuelled approach to the concept: predicting vast interconnected supercomputers of pooled computing power from which users could tap in and use the resources they needed.

It did not help that one of the early examples of grid computing in action - the SETI@home project - made use of the unused processing power of PCs around the globe to analyse signals from outer space in the hope of finding signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

In comparison, Oracle's 10g strategy was focused resolutely on potential business benefits. "Our grid concept works within the boundary of an enterprise," says Sutherland. "We're not suggesting you link up with competitors and create some massive grid. We're not there yet. There was a thought that this was hype," he adds. "That seems to have dissipated now."

Some evidence for that comes from Oracle's Grid Index, which tracks attitudes to grid computing among businesses across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, and is conducted by UK analyst company Quocirca.

The index measures responses to four primary criteria: knowledge of grid technology concepts, the perceived operational benefits, the level of commitment to deploying grid technologies, and the expectation of return on investment, with scores given on a scale of 0 to 10.

The latest index results, released in April, indicated that industry acceptance of grid computing is on the up, and that grid is following a typical technology adoption lifecycle. For example, Europe's overall score increased to 4.39, compared to 3.1 at the launch in September 2004.

While scores for knowledge and awareness of benefits were relatively high, at 5.61 and 4.89, respectively, many businesses are yet to act on their increased understanding of the potential benefits, with commitment and ROI lagging behind at 2.45 and 1.89, demonstrating the critical point which has been reached in adoption of the technology.

That said, the Grid Index also indicates that some geographies are moving faster than others. South East Asia scored 5.2, just ahead of the Nordic region with 5.1. Australia and New Zealand scored 4.8, China 4.7, and the US and Germany both scored 4.6. The UK scored 4.3.

"I think now is a critical point that all IT users must make that move, because others are, and those that do will get significant advantage," says Sutherland. "It is inevitable that we'll see machines more efficiently clustered and virtualised."

The benefits of adopting grid technology lie initially in the more efficient use of computing resources, but there are additional benefits that are also beginning to be realised by early adopters, according to Sutherland.

"The benefits that are there are lower outlay, improved availability, and improved scalability, but actually the one that comes out most is risk mitigation." Sutherland adds that it is often new applications that are being grid-enabled, and that by using a pool of resources, businesses can lower hardware purchasing costs for new systems by making use of the pool as more processing power is required.

While new projects might be the first to be grid enabled, a core tenet of Oracle's grid strategy has been to introduce grid functionality into existing products, such as its database, application server, and development tools, enabling older systems to evolve on to the grid.

"Our technology's all about taking heritage systems into a grid environment with minimal disruption in doing so," says Sutherland, adding that there has also been the introduction of new cross-product functionality to tie it all together, such as the Grid Control set of monitoring and management tools. "Each component is grid enabled in itself, but quite critically the essential part of the grid is how you manage it, and that component is Grid Control," he says.

While the technology enables grid computing, Sutherland also indicates the importance of taking a business process-oriented view of grid computing if a business is to fully realise the potential benefits. "It is possible to put grid in place from the bottom up and abstract it from the business, however the true benefits come from shared services."

The businesses that are gaining early adopter advantage from grid are not just consolidating their systems onto the grid, but also their business processes via a service-oriented architecture approach to application development and process design.

"To truly get the benefits, it's important to consolidate the process and the data," says Sutherland. "Very often IT users are doing that in any case, because it's got its own inherent savings; and it's a great step for moving to the grid. To me, like grid, SOA is inevitable. We [the industry] will do it, it's just a question of when, and how quickly."

PART TWO OF THIS SERIES CAN BE FOUND HERE