Tuesday, 13 June 2006

Growing Interest in Grid Application Deployment Among Enterprises

Only a few applications have been written specifically for grids, and only a small number of today's commercial applications that appear suitable for grids have actually been deployed on or migrated to grids, according to The 451 Group. But as enterprise momentum for grid computing and associated infrastructure models increases...

Only a few applications have been written specifically for grids, and only a small number of today's commercial applications that appear suitable for grids have actually been deployed on or migrated to grids, according to The 451 Group. But as enterprise momentum for grid computing and associated infrastructure models increases, new design points, development models and tools for creating and enabling commercial applications for grids will be required. This is especially apparent when considering grids as an intersection of virtualization, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and utility or on-demand delivery models.

These findings appear in a report released by The 451 Group, a New York-based technology-industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation. "The extent to which grid technologies enable and underpin next-generation distributed computing environments will depend in large part on the ability of new and existing application assets to be deployed in these environments. This is why application development and enablement strategies – and not just deployment, runtime and execution environments – are crucial to the arc of overall grid deployment," said William Fellows, Principal Analyst at The 451 Group.

The 451 Group believes early adopters will pay particular attention to SOA, which, together with grids, promises to enable them to develop and run application services without regard for the underlying infrastructure and to deploy (or decommission) resources without affecting the application environment. Grids bring the kind of fault-tolerance and scalability to Web services that can enable SOAs. The 451 Group's GARS research finds that grids enable early adopters to run Web services better, faster and cheaper because they are cross-platform, can scale and offer better utilization – and they allow users to dodge platform and language wars as well.

Many ISVs interviewed for this report that have not yet grid-enabled their applications regard this activity as something they will be able to do if and when it is required. 451 analysts found that most ISVs do not appear to appreciate the challenges they will face – or even fully understand the approaches they could take.

Moreover, grid-enablement typically means writing – or more often rewriting – an application to run on a grid, with all the associated APIs. Some of the more obvious challenges include:

• Running an application in a distributed environment creates challenges related to job splitting, division and queuing, as well as with shared memory and data management.
• Running a job across a grid requires the use of shared infrastructure, presenting the danger that two applications will want the same resource at the same time, which is known as 'deadly embrace' or 'deadlocking.'
• Managing the output from a job run on a grid is another pain point, as are caching and the wider integration between storage, compute and network resources.