The New Nation - Internet Edition

Peter Thomas

Given today's economic reality, companies must maximise the utilisation of their existing IT resources. Grid computing techniques work towards this by helping companies consolidate their hardware, eliminating islands of under utilised computers to create centralised pools of computing and allocate resources to meet corporate objectives.

At its highest level, grid computing is computing as a utility. Companies should not have to care where their data resides, or what computer processes a request. Employees should be able to request information or computation and have it delivered - as much as they want, whenever they want. This is similar to the way electric utilities work. You do not 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.

This concept of utility computing is gaining mindshare among IT organisations. The number of inquiries Oracle receives about grid computing is increasing. We are also seeing more customers carrying out pilot projects, or using grid computing as part of their IT strategy.

Grid techniques can allow organizations to align their computing resources with the priorities of their business. Grid computing offers tremendous advantages - lower costs and greater throughput. But, achieving these gains could be costly, and time consuming. Software vendors need to provide the infrastructure that enables their users to easily adopt these Grid techniques.

Oracle has been involved in grid computing for years, as both an end-user and a vendor. We think that makes us unique among the major software vendors.

As a grid user, Oracle uses a grid to develop its database product. It allows us to allocate resources to specific development projects when we need to. It gives us much more computing power than any other alternative computing investment would give us. We believe that using a grid gives us competitive advantages in our industry: Quality, productivity, and time to market.

As a grid vendor, we think we can help customers gain the same kinds of benefits we've gained from grid computing. Products that support grid computing now, and in the future, are the same Oracle products available today: Oracle9i Database, Oracle9i Application Server, and the technology stack built on top of them. In essence there are no additional costs for current Oracle customers to move to Oracle grids.

Oracle has key grid technology differentiators - such as Oracle9i Database with Real Application Clusters, Oracle Streams, and Oracle Transportable Table spaces, among many others.

In the future, Oracle will include additional grid features in our products that will be available as organisations upgrade to newer product versions. Oracle grid customers can feel confident their investment in Oracle technology will be leveraged as the grid evolves. Our strategy will be to continue to offer integrated software.

We think grid computing is the next big thing, and we think that it is already starting to happen.

[Peter Thomas is the Senior Director, Oracle9i Application Server, Oracle Asia Pacific]