The New Nation - Internet Edition

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.