Grid computing is becoming must have norm of technology that academics, researchers, and scientists around the world are developing to help organizations take collective advantage of improvements in microprocessor speeds, optical communications, raw storage capacity, and the Internet. By using the technique to disaggregate their computer platforms and distribute them as network resources, companies can vastly increase their computing capacity. For example, companies are using grid computing to accelerate the pace of drug development, process complex financial models, and animate movies. Linking geographically dispersed computer systems can lead to staggering gains in computing power, speed, and productivity.

The impact of grid computing on database technology is enormous. It has led to consolidation of hardware, applications, and information shared among one or more data centers. The idea is to have fewer grids with larger pools of resources because larger grids increase reliability and reduce management costs. Oracle 10g is the only infrastructure that has full grid server cluster capabilities for all applications transaction processing, decision support, and enterprise content management. That means that only Oracle can run your existing applications in a grid-computing environment with no rewrite required.

Likewise, grid computing has led to the standardization of servers, storage, and operating systems; use of common infrastructure services such as provisioning and identity management; standardization of application services made available as Web services; standardization of information sources and metadata. An important part of lowering costs and increasing flexibility with grid computing is to designate standard units of hardware, application services, and information that will form the basis of a new grid. The more resources that can be standardized, the lower the cost and the greater the flexibility of the overall infrastructure.

Grid computing has fostered the automation of all day-to-day management tasks, enabling a single administrator to simultaneously handle hundreds of servers in clusters.  Because enterprise grids can have very many servers and application services, a grid can be too large to be managed manually. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g has automated the day-to-day maintenance required for an enterprise grid by providing a centralized management console called Oracle Grid Control. Software installation, patching, upgrading, workload balancing, security, and much more are all handled centrally from Oracle Grid Control. This means the entire infrastructure can be managed as one large computing system. One or a few administrators can maintain even the largest grid data center.

Furthermore, by treating application logic as another resource in the grid enables better software reuse and creates applications that are easier to change. In the same way that grid computing enables better reuse and more flexibility of IT infrastructure resources, grid computing also treats application components as resources. Then, by publishing and coordinating those resources into more complex business flows, grid computing enables greater reuse of application functionality and more flexibility in changing and building new composite applications.

In addition, current grid computing especially on databases such as Oracle 10g allows virtualization and provisioning of infrastructure resources, which means pooling resources together and allocating to the appropriate consumers based on policies. For example, one policy might be to dedicate enough processing power to a Web server that it can always provide sub-second response time. This rule could be fulfilled in different ways by the provisioning software in order to balance the requests of all consumers. Treating infrastructure resources as a single pool and allocating those resources on demand saves money by eliminating underutilized capacity and redundant capabilities.

References:

IDC, 2004. www.oracle.com/technology/tech/grid/collateral/idc_oracle10g.pdf

Mainstay Partners ROI Series, www.oracle.com/customers/studies/roi

http://www.oracle.com/customers/studies/roi/oraclegridcomputing.pdf

 Stair R., Reynolds, G. (2006). “Principles of Information Systems, 7th Ed.” Massachusetts: Thomson Technology