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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 29, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 39
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Special Features:
ELLISON, OTHERS SPEAK OF GRID'S
FUTURE, POTENTIAL
Jamie Shiers, Database Group lead manager at CERN, the birthplace of the
World
Wide Web, said at OracleWorld last week that Grid computing is the next big
thing.
Shiers said that Grid computing, like the Internet, is new technology that
can
change everything, and that his organization is "actively involved in making
it happen."
However, where Shiers and other panelists couldn't agree on what exactly
the
Grid is, or when it will be complete, Oracle's Larry Ellison was more
certain.
Ellison said that Grid computing is the biggest thing in about 40 years,
and
his company just launched an initiative joining utility computing, on-demand
computing and the adaptive enterprise as vendor terms for a sort of
one-size-fits-all strategy for enterprise computing—the idea being that
overspending and overprovisioning result in inefficient computer
architectures.
While building a commercial Grid does make a lot of sense, taking that Grid
experience from its current academic surroundings to the enterprise is a big
task. The IT community has just struggled through a summer of viruses, spam
and restricted budgets. While Grids do address redundancy well, their ability
to address security is far less proven. The widespread adoption of Grids will
be resolved much more in testing labs and settings where peers can exchange
their Grid experiences than in corporate executive suites where all computing
decisions are narrowed to spreadsheet operations.
The challenge of maintaining user control and limiting application access
as
a
Grid shuttles and adjusts the system based on demand is daunting. Equally
daunting will be the job for pricing based on the Grid. While Ellison, in a
later session, declined to reveal pricing, he did hint that Oracle is
considering a blanket enterprise license rather than a per-user or per-seat
price.
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