The New Nation - Internet Edition

Grid computing solves IT infrastructure's problems

Mazhar Zoaib

You're a financial services company. At the end of the quarter, when you're processing your clients' reports, you'd like to focus most of your processing power there. Four weeks later, when you're analysing returns from a big marketing campaign, you'd like to shift that power to your data warehouse. So how would you reallocate your processing resources? Most likely, you wouldn't.

Each database server would be outfitted for its respective peak load, with one running hot while the other runs cold. That is, unless you've set up a grid to dynamically reallocate your computer resources, to share them across departments in your organization.

Easy to say but hard to do - until now. Advances in clustered computing power, faster networks and shared storage are placing the benefits of grid computing within reach of even the most cost-conscious businesses today. When deployed on Linux and powered by Oracle, IT organizations can now build dynamic industry-standard grid systems well suited to meet the rapidly shifting needs of twenty-first-century business.

What is Grid?: Grid computing is a new IT architecture that produces more resilient and lower cost enterprise information systems. With grid computing, groups of independent, modular hardware and software components can be connected and rejoined on demand to meet the changing needs of businesses.

Grid computing has increased momentum as the enterprise IT architecture of choice. Forrester Research reports that 37 percent of enterprises are piloting, rolling out, or have implemented some form of grid computing. IDC identifies grid computing as the Fifth Generation of computing, after Client-Server and Multi-tier. Leading businesses, such as Dell and the Chicago Stock Exchange have begun deploying enterprise grids.

The grid style of computing aims to solve some common problems with enterprise IT: the problem of application silos that lead to under utilized, dedicated hardware resources; the problem of monolithic, unwieldy systems that are expensive to maintain and difficult to change; and the problem of fragmented and disintegrated information that cannot be fully exploited by the enterprise as a whole.

What is Oracle Grid?: At the highest level, the central idea of grid computing is computing as a utility. By that, we mean that you shouldn't care where your data resides, or what computer processes your request. You should be able to request information or computation and have it delivered - as much as you want, and whenever you want. This is analogous to the way electric utilities work, in that you don't know where the generator is, or how the electric grid is wired, you just ask for electricity, and you get it. The goal is to make computing a utility, a commodity, and ubiquitous. Hence the name, The Grid. This view of utility computing is, of course, a "client side" view.

From the "server side", or behind the scenes, the grid is about resource allocation, information sharing, and high availability. Resource allocation ensures that all those that need or request resources are getting what they need, that resources are not standing idle while requests are going out of service.

Information sharing makes sure that the information users and applications need is available where and when it is needed. High availability features guarantee all the data and computation is always there, just like a utility company always provides electric power.

Benefits of Grid Computing: "The best thing about the Grid is that it is unstoppable." The Economist, June 21, 2001

Compared to other models of computing, IT systems designed and implemented in the grid style deliver a higher quality of service, at a lower cost, with greater flexibility. Higher quality of service results from having no single point of failure, a powerful security infrastructure, and centralized, policy-driven management.

Lower costs derive from increasing the utilization of resources and dramatically reducing management and maintenance costs. Rather than dedicating a stack of software and hardware to a specific task, all resources are pooled and allocated on demand, which eliminates under utilized capacity and redundant capabilities. Grid computing also enables the use of smaller individual hardware components, which reduces the cost of each individual component and providing more flexibility to devote resources in accordance with changing needs.

Core Tenets of Grid Computing: Two core tenets uniquely distinguish grid computing from other styles of computing, such as mainframe, client-server, or multi-tier: virtualisation and provisioning.. With virtualisation, individual resources (e.g. computers, disks, application components and information sources) are pooled together by type then made available to consumers (e.g. people or software programs) through an abstraction.

Virtualisation means breaking hard-coded connections between providers and consumers of resources, and preparing a resource to serve a particular need without the consumer caring how that is accomplished. oWith provisioning, when consumers request resources through a virtualisation layer, behind the scenes a specific resource is identified to fulfil the request and then it is allocated to the consumer. Provisioning as part of grid computing means that the system determines how to meet the specific need of the consumer, while optimising operation of the system as a whole.

The specific ways in which information, application, or infrastructure resources are virtualised and provisioned are specific to the type of resource, but the concepts apply universally. Similarly, the specific benefits derived from grid computing are particular to each type of resource, but all share the characteristics of better quality, lower costs, and increased flexibility.

How is Grid different from other technologies such as Clusters/P2P/ASP? : Grid computing moves the complexity of managing the infrastructure largely into the software away from the OS and hardware.

This approach is fundamentally different from the way hardware vendors typically approach grid computing. Moving the complexity into the Oracle software makes sense because now Oracle's software has the sophistication to take on complex computing challenges that were traditionally in the OS / hardware domain.

To handle the added sophistication, Oracle has among other things added features like ASM (Automatic Storage Manager), CRS (Cluster Ready Services), Database Vault, Service level management etc., which help handle the complexities that arise when multiple systems are consolidated on a common grid infrastructure.

Oracle has also added considerable functionality into the management space to make life a lot simpler for the DBAs thereby freeing them up to do more value added tasks. Routine activities like space management, resource management etc., have been largely automated.

MetaRAM aims to solve bottleneck in computers

Reuters, San Francisco

Fred Weber, chief executive of memory-chip technology start-up MetaRAM Inc, has a knack for making complicated things sound simple.

The semiconductor industry veteran, who headed up the development of the Opteron chip at Advanced Micro Devices Inc, is getting ready to take the wraps off his 35-person San Jose, California, company that claims to have solved a major bottleneck bedeviling high-powered server computers.

"It means combining lots of things and making those things appear as one thing," Weber said in an interview, explaining the chip his company developed which tricks a server into thinking four standard 1-gigabyte memory chips are actually one monolithic 4 gigabyte chip.

"Think of it as two guys in a horse suit," said Weber, who counts legendary computer hardware designer Andy Bechtolsheim as an early, individual investor in MetaRAM.

As Intel Corp, the world's biggest chipmaker, and AMD, its smaller rival, have moved to making microprocessors with multiple cores-essentially multiple brains-to boost performance, a bottleneck of bits in a computer's memory system is slowing things down.

"How the heck am I going to get enough memory to feed all this," Weber said. "The memory roadmap is not going as fast.

For decades, the computing power of semiconductors has doubled roughly every 18 months, a maxim known as Moore's Law in the technology industry and identified in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. But capacity in dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, chips, doubles only every three years or so.

"We're saying when you want to put more memory in, don't buy big fancy memory chips, buy a whole bunch of commodity DRAM," Weber, 44, said.

"Pour hundreds of them into a machine and our one little chip will trick the machine into thinking it's one bigger chip."

Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64, said that, because more data can be loaded into the system memory at once, it speeds up considerably how quickly a processor can crunch a database, by a factor of 10.

"Say you're trying to simulate the next jetliner and you want the whole darn thing to be in memory," Brookwood said. "To do that with current technology is hard and expensive.

"For folks who need lots of memory, this is going to be a godsend," Brookwood said.

MetaRAM's chipset sits between the memory controller and the DRAM and allows four times more run-of-the-mill DRAM chips to be integrated into existing memory modules on the server's motherboard, without the need for any hardware or software changes, Weber said.

MetaRAM's chip, made by contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Amkor Technology Inc, can also cut the cost of a high-performing computer server often used by aerospace, automotive, financial services, and oil and gas exploration companies.

"We use commodity parts, apply them to existing standards, and then you can create simple revolutions," Weber said. "You can make a $500,000 computer into a $50,000 computer."

In addition to funding from Bechtolsheim, MetaRAM has a total of $20 million venture capital funding so far with the backing of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Storm Ventures, and Intel Capital, the VC arm of Intel.

Weber said that the MetaRAM chips, which work with Intel and AMD microprocessors, will be available in the first quarter in systems from Appro, Colfax International, Rackable Systems and Verari Systems.

He said he expects that, ultimately, the big five server makers-IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co, Dell Inc, Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems Inc would also build servers with MetaRAM chips.

"I deliberately picked a problem where we could hire 30 top-notch people and get them in one building and solve that problem," Weber said. "Globalization is great, but communication is hard."

Oracle database proved e-business friendly

IT Reporter

Oracle has announced the certification of Oracle® Database Vault for use with the Oracle E-Business Suite. This enables customers to better protect sensitive application data from unauthorized access by any user, including privileged users, misusing their database privileges, Oracle informed through a press released.

The Database Vault of Oracle is the industry's most advanced database security product designed to enforce when, where, how, and by whom, data can be accessed.

According to the press release, the Oracle E-Business Suite applications including Oracle Human Capital Management, Oracle Financial Management, Oracle Supply Chain Management and Oracle Customer Relationship Management, often contain personal identification information (PII), social security or credit card numbers that must be protected.

Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Basel II, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS) require companies to consider separation of duty and strong access controls on access to sensitive information.

The certification of Oracle Database Vault for use with the Oracle E-Business Suite enables customers to better address their security and regulatory challenges.

Oracle Database Vault transparently defends against unauthorized access to application data as well as intentional or accidental harmful database changes by any users, even privileged users with database administrator (DBA) rights, taking into consideration multiple factors such as time of day, authentication, application, and more.

"Organizations rely on the Oracle E-Business Suite to drive key components of their business from finance to human resources to supply chain," said Cliff Godwin, senior vice president, Application Technology, Oracle. "The combination of Oracle Database Vault and the Oracle E-Business Suite helps enterprises secure their data against insider threats and comply with regulatory mandates."

"Oracle Database Vault monitors activity inside the database and enforces real-time preventive controls," said Vipin Samar, vice president of Database Security, Oracle. "Organizations can now protect sensitive E-Business suite application data at the source - the database."

Apple's iPhone SDK marketing delayed

John Cox

A brief post by BusinessWeek blogger Arik Hesseldahl, citing a single, unnamed source, reports that Apple may miss its original target date for the SDK, the end of February, by one to three weeks. The slight delay is unlikely to be anything but a minor embarrassment for Apple, assuming that it can deliver a workable SDK relatively soon. Hesseldahl wrote that Apple had no comment.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced last October that the company decided to release a toolset that would let software developers build their own applications for the iPhone. That was a turnaround for the company: When the iPhone was released early last summer exclusively on AT&T's cellular network, Apple only provided hooks to let developers access basic iPhone functions (such as sending an e-mail) through the onboard Safari Web browser. The company touted the Web-based approach as safe and easy to use.

Early users exploited those hooks to the max.

Native Applications Needed

But for many, the iPhone won't live up to its full potential, especially for business users, until applications can run natively on the device itself, directly interacting with the operating system. The iPhone was hacked almost as soon it was released, to shift it to other cellular networks, and to let hackers run their own applications. Apple countered with operating system upgrades that wrecked the applications, prompting new hacking attempts.

It's still unclear what kind of applications the authorized SDK will allow. Jobs' original October blog post that announced the SDK had almost no details. He wrote that Apple was trying to balance two potentially conflicting goals: making it easy for iPhone developers to build and distribute applications, and making it difficult for those applications to break the iPhone or introduce malware.

Long-time Mac developer Christopher Allen, founder and facilitator of the iPhoneWebDev.com site, speculated then that rather than true native applications, what Apple may have in mind is something closer to the widgets in Mac OS X and the upcoming Leopard operating system. "It can look beautiful, have a great [user interface], but [mostly] it is JavaScript and XML, and some native function calls and snippets of highly efficient C code," Allen said.