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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 30, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 26
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Special Features:
GRIDXPERT OFFERS GRID "PEOPLE
RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT"
French startup GridXpert has begun shipping Syngery, a grid software
application geared toward managing the needs and requirements of users
accessing a grid (consumers, service providers, administrators and project
managers) rather than the underlying resources. It claims it can work on top
of any current grid scheduling system and that Sun Microsystems has agreed to
incorporate support for its APIs into Sun GridEngine.
Impact assessment
The message
GridXpert had its Synergy grid 'people relationship management' system in
testing with six companies and says Sun is to incorporate Synergy agent APIs
into GridEngine.
Competitive landscape
GridFrastructure has 70% of the same functionality. GridXpert says Entropia
and United Devices will be its chief adversaries.
The451 assessment
Grids are going to need managing, but with grid technology still very much
at
the handshake stage, it's not yet clear how ISVs will be able to leverage any
standard approaches. Moreover, the scheduler, traditional and Web services
management vendors have all indicated they will participate once there is some
real activity. Certainly the vertical market approach makes the most sense
right now. If GridXpert can get its software established at some reference
sites, Sun is sure to become more interested in it.
Technology
GridXpert claims Synergy enables organizations to model, optimize and
analyze
the use of multiple software and hardware resources at different locations -
within or across enterprise boundaries. Within an organization, fluctuations
in workgroups and available resources occur as virtual workgroups are formed,
transformed and dissolved.
The company's pitch is that Synergy allows project manager to shop for
resources and to work with a resources utilization budget. Consumers can get a
Web portal to launch and monitor jobs via Syngery. Grid administrators get a
global view and are able to analyze and optimize resource utilization. Service
providers can sell service offerings with guaranteed service-level agreements
(SLAs), and implement accounting.
The J2EE Grid Manager is the central piece of GridXpert Synergy. Users
connect
to the Grid Manager via their Web browsers. It manages all the information on
resources and users in a database. Grid Agents are deployed on all the
computers in the Grid; for example, on top of OpenPBS, Sun GridEngine,
Platform LSF or a PC scheduler. They interact with these local schedulers - or
meta-schedulers - collecting information from them and feeding back
information on local status and output to the Grid Manager.
Synergy includes security to authenticate users, define their profiles,
verify
access rights and secure transmission of data.
GridXpert's plan is to create a portfolio of applications that work with
Synergy - it says it's offering accounting, chargeback and other applications
as part of the initial packaging, but is leery of making technical details
public.
Synergy 1.0 became available in March, and will cost €50,000 ($58,470) for
100
CPUs over three years.
Strategy
GridXpert's big claim is that Sun will integrate Synergy agent APIs into
GridEngine, although it's not something Sun has trumpeted. Synergy is top-down
and complements GridEngine's bottom-up approach - that's how GridXpert
characterizes the technical relationship. It sounds like Sun has decided to
see how GridXpert gets on in its local markets before hoisting any flags.
Indeed, on first look GridXpert appears remarkably similar to Sun's
Distributed Resource Management Application API standard (DRMAA) - although
GridXpert says the two are complementary because Synergy is taking information
from schedulers.
Sun's hope is that independent software vendors (ISVs) will support DRMAA
in
their applications; users should then be able to run those applications
against any scheduler that supports DRMAA. Sun's claim is that grid users lack
an easy way to integrate their purchased applications with schedulers, and
then support them on every new operating system platform. DRMAA is effectively
an abstraction layer that, if adopted by the DRM companies - Sun, Platform,
PBS, Condor - would enable ISVs to write a single version of an application
that would work on multiple DRM systems, thereby enabling these end users to
configure heterogeneous grid systems. So far only Sun and partners Intel and
Cadence are backing it.
GridXpert says Synergy will enable consumers 'to use grids, but forget
them,'
meaning they should become invisible. Moreover, the idea isn't to solve the
problems that schedulers are solving, but to allow project managers, for
example, to decide on a level of spending that will provide a certain compute
level and service level.
Synergy is targeted initially at scientific organizations and researchers,
and
GridXpert claims to have six users in evaluation: three in the UK and three in
France. The company counts Sun, IBM and Hewlett-Packard as partners; and IBM
global services, GWS, ServiWare and CS as consulting and implementation
partners. GridXpert is likely to target ISVs and users in specific vertical
application markets, in order to try and get a footprint by offering a
complete solution for a given vertical.
The French startup, founded by a slew of former supply chain ISV execs, was
funded with €3m in June from ETF and others and will look for a further €10m
in a year or so, it says, which will take it to breakeven. It has a staff of
20.
Competition Last year, startup GridFrastructure came into focus, claiming
to
be developing a suite of management, authentication, security, resource
utilization and monitoring, accounting, charge-back and billing tools and
resources that will work with a range of underlying grid middleware. Even back
then it sounded remarkably similar to what GridXpert was doing. And according
to GridXpert, GridFrastructure offered itself for sale. After looking over the
technology, GridXpert reckoned it overlapped by 70% and decided not to
proceed.
GridXpert claims United Devices and Entropia are the chief competition it
will
face.
Courtesy the451.com
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