DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / OCTOBER 6, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 40    ( Table of Contents )

Special Features:

ORACLE'S PLAN TO UNLOCK THE GRID
By Ivan Walsh, Editor, IBMStrategy.com

At the recent OracleWorld event in San Francisco, Larry Ellison, CEO of the world's second largest software company, unveiled 10g. In typical fashion he declared that, "after 40 years, we've [Oracle] created a whole new approach to enterprise computing." He later introduced the Grid-enabled 10g versions of Oracle Application Server and Oracle Database. Grid computing has moved from being a niche industry a few years back, to the "next big thing," according to IT soothsayers. For Oracle, this is a significant moment.

While others have mapped out new strategies, in particular IBM's Midas touch in the consultancy space, Oracle has struggled to shift the public perception that it is no more than an uber-database company, albeit the most successful one on the planet. And with a forceful CEO like Ellison, it's working hard to change this perception.

At the moment, IBM reigns in regards all things Grid. Both of their DeveloperWorks and AlphaWorks sites offer reams of products, open source applications, white papers and case studies that demonstrate an impressive arsenal of expertise in this area. They've also won very lucrative government contracts to build massive Grids -- supplying the hardware, software and consultancy services.

HP, Sun and others such as Dell, and even Gateway, have been here for a while. Now it is Oracle's turn to join the party.

Not to be deterred, Ellison points out that, "For 40 years, the object for IBM has been to build bigger, faster mainframes," and emphasized that a 40-year-old architecture creates problems, as it demands increasingly powerful servers.

He then announced Oracle's new world view with Oracle 10g -- the "g" denotes Grid -- which is due out later in the year.

How Oracle Sees A Grid

However, before we explore this move by Oracle, we need to be careful with our definition of the term Grid. What Oracle considers a "Grid" is very different to both IBM's "on demand" and HP's "adaptive enterprise" use of the term. In Oracle's world a Grid is a network of computers either within a company or across several companies.

As Oracle goes down this route, it moves into the system management space, where competition with the system management vendors will be intense. This area has become increasing congested with the recent entry of identity management and security vendors.

Oracle's value proposition revolves around low-cost hardware (e.g. Linux) and beefing it up with a sleuth of Oracle products that will manage the Grid's capacity "on demand."

Let's look a little more at the Oracle paradigm. Its faith in this new approach runs along these lines:

• Tight Integration -- Instead of building new products for Grid computing, Oracle has put Grid capabilities inside its product portfolio -- Oracle9i, Oracle9iAS and the technology stack built on top of them.
In Oracle's model, when you move to Grid computing, you don't have to skill-up and learn new applications; you use what you have. For companies on tight budgets, especially those already using Oracle, this is a compelling proposition.
• Portability -- Oracle runs the same code base on blades as on SMP, in contrast with other vendors who use different code bases for different operating systems. In the Oracle world, you should be able to move easily to Grid computing without have to re-write any existing applications.
Ellison has been critical of the approach used by other vendors. In particular, the limitations posed by depending on a single box. He believes that this approach is expensive, limits capacity and offers limited reliability (e.g. single point of failure).
• Oracle vision -- which Oracle refers to as "enterprise Grid computing" -- comprises of collections of separate systems running enterprise applications. Its Grid solution includes four "resource pools": a storage Grid, database Grid, application server Grid and Grid control software.

Enterprise Grid Computing

Enterprise Grid computing offers a software infrastructure that supports large numbers of small, networked computers under two related concepts:

• Implement One From Many -- The Grid coordinates clusters of machines to create single logical entity (e.g. an application server). As this entity is implemented across many machines, you can add or remove capacity to suit your requirements. Implement One From Many gives you virtualization at every layer, dynamic provisioning and resource pooling.
• Manage Many As One -- This approach encompasses self-adaptive software, unified management and implements them throughout every element of the Grid (i.e. storage, databases, application servers and applications). Here you can manage groups of machines, groups of database instances and groups of application servers at low-cost (e.g. Linux servers).

Oracle 10G In More Detail

Later in the year, when 10g is released Grid computing functionality will be included in Oracle's three main Grid products:

• Oracle Database 10g
• Oracle Application Server 10g
• Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control

Oracle Database 10g

This is based on Real Application Clusters, introduced in Oracle9i, which enables a single database to run across multiple clustered nodes in a Grid, pooling the processing resources of several standard machines.

Oracle has the ability to provision workload across machines, and does not require data to be partitioned and distributed along with the work. New integrated clusterware eliminates the need to purchase, install, configure and support third-party clusterware, as servers can be added and dropped to an Oracle cluster with no downtime.

Oracle claims that this is the only database technology to include clusterware for all operating systems, which significantly reduces the opportunities for failure in a clustered environment. Other features in 10g include Automatic Storage Management, Information Provisioning and Self-Managing Database functionality.

Oracle Application Server 10g

The 10g application server provides an infrastructure platform for developing and deploying applications, and integrating functions such as a Web services runtime environment, an integration broker, business intelligence and identity management services.

Its run-time services can be pooled and virtualized via application server clusters, so that every service within the Oracle Application Server (i.e. J2EE, Web Services and LDAP), can be distributed across multiple machines in a Grid. The 10g server also includes Identity Management functionality and an Application Development Framework.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control

This integrated, central management console (and underlying framework) automates administrative tasks across sets of systems in a Grid environment. You can group multiple hardware nodes, databases, application servers and other targets into single logical entities. It can execute jobs, enforce policies and automate tasks across a group of targets instead of on disparate systems individually.

The software provisioning features in Grid Control lets Oracle 10g automate the installation, configuration,and cloning of Application Server 10g and Database 10g across multiples nodes. It also provides a common framework for software provisioning and management, letting you create, configure, deploy and utilize new servers with new instances of the application server and database(s) as they are needed.

The Application Service Level Monitoring tool lets you view the availability and performance of the Grid infrastructure as a unified whole. You can trace the root cause of the problem right down to the individual Java class or, for example, the individual system configuration parameter.

Different Strokes For Different Folks

However, it's worth recapping that Oracle and IBM have very different philosophies regarding their Grid solutions. This is partly, as mentioned previously, due to their respective interpretation of what actually constitutes a Grid:

• From Oracle's perspective, low-cost blades are critical to the economics of the Grid. Commodity hardware computing is a key component of its long-standing strategy.
• IBM uses high-end SMP machines and argue that higher-end machines are more reliable.

For most readers, the term "Grid" is generally associated with academic and scientific projects, such as research into weather-forecasting or using the Grid for Life Science projects.

Indeed, IBM made several announcements in the past six months with hospitals and pharmaceutical companies to research cures for cancer and drug discovery ventures. In these projects, massive number-crunching and heavyweight processing power are the beneficiaries of the Grid technologies.

Is Oracle's Approach The Best Choice?

In fairness, it is too early to make a judgment. Nonetheless, there are some areas where Oracle's approach may have an edge:

• Blades -- running everything on blades lets you re-allocate (provision) hardware to meet changing business priorities. You can provision them to Web servers, databases or application servers as need be. By comparison, other databases need to run on SMP to run applications. Oracle argues that SMP is the reason why "islands of computing" exist and makes IT infrastructures so inflexible.
• Oracle RAC -- this lets you add and remove blades to the database without any downtime. The adding and dropping of CPUs is referred to as "CPU provisioning." Again, other database vendors make you repartition data when you add or drop nodes from the database -- more downtime.
• Oracle Streams, Transportable Tablespaces, and Oracle's distributed SQL and gateways lets you share data where it's needed as Oracle integrates all this capability with the database. Oracle argues that rival databases can't make information available as needed without middleware and customized coding.

JDeveloper Gets A Boost

In line with the Grid announcement, JDeveloper, Oracle's high-end development tool for enterprise-level applications, will be extended to support J2EE 1.4, the Web services-enabled variant of J2EE.

JDeveloper 10g is not designed specifically for building Grids, but as Oracle's development environment for building services-based applications for the Grid.

Oracle wants its customers to avoid purchasing a separate IDE for developing Grids -- and the ramifications which such a move could have -- and, instead, have bundled JDeveloper 10g into the database and application server. In other words, once you have the database, you can then build the Grid up from there, not the other way around.

Oracle Database 10g will also include HTML DB, a database development tool for building less intensive applications.

Call For Commercial Grid Consortium

For Oracle to sell its database-enabling Grids to the enterprise market, it recognizes that several things have to happen.

Taking a note from IBM's book, Oracle is pushing the need for standards. It has set the ball rolling by proposing to establish a dedicated consortium to focus on standards for commercial facing Grid technologies.

Chuck Rozwat, Oracle executive vice president for server technologies, says, "We're interested in forming a commercial Grid consortium so that together with other members of the industry we can define standards that make up the APIs and functions for the commercial Grid computing infrastructure."

In case you're wondering if you'd heard this before, you have. A standards group for Grid computing already exists.

In 1998, the Global Grid Forum was founded for that very purpose. The GGF describes itself as a "community-driven set of working groups that are developing standards and best practices for distributed computing." Oracle, Sun, IBM, HP, Intel and Microsoft are all members.

However, Oracle believes that such standards groups tend to lean toward Grid technologies for academic and research environments, while it is more interested in developing standards for commercial Grid applications. After all, Oracle's idea of a Grid within a company differs considerably from international space exploration projects run across universities and government agencies. Oracle want to sell Grids to large enterprises. Ford, for example, could use a Grid to manage its data and applications across all US and regional offices, and also interface with trusted third parties.

Response To (New) Commercial Grid Standards

Replying to Oracle's announcement, Charlie Catlett, chair of the Global Grid Forum, published an article on the GGF site, which says, "Unfortunately, there has been a combination of inaccurate information and suggestions that there may be a conflict between the research and commercial communities who we see collaborating closely in GGF. The primary arguments in favor of a new, commercial Grid standards effort have had to do with the difference between science/research and commercial approaches to computing, coupled with a characterization of GGF as primarily non-commercial."

He adds that 40 percent of GGF participants are from the IT industry; two- thirds of the sponsoring organizations are commercial companies, and "consumers" members such as Johnson and Johnson, Boeing, DaimlerChrysler, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly and Ford Motor Company also contribute.

GGF also has a strong set of activities developing standards for integrating databases into open Grid systems

On the subject of the different needs of science and research applications relative to commercial, business applications, Catlett suggests that, "the applications are different in many ways, just as they are in other contexts- but there are also underlying standards that are shared."

Commercial and science applications have many areas in common: Internet technologies; microprocessors; storage technologies; operating systems; and security technologies. If standards can be developed for both areas -- commercial and science -- it raises the question of how Oracle can benefit from another separate standards group.

For now, Oracle has conceded that, "We're definitely not trying to compete with the Global Grid Forum, and we think some people will be members of both groups."

It is currently talking with biotech, financial services and health care companies who are interested in Grid computing, and are finalizing agreements with several organizations who wish to participate in the consortium.

From Hype To Reality

Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina also spoke at the OracleWorld conference. She made several noteworthy points and explained that, "Grid computing has been more hype than reality. HP's goal for the Grid is to do for IT resources what the Web did for documents: provide ubiquitous and easy access." Fiorina also differentiated between Grid computing and distributed computing -- she sees the distributed model as a 20-year-old concept, while the Grid computing model enables companies to share processing power, and gain access to "islands of computation," where certain applications require their own dedicated machines for intensive number-crunching.

Other analysts have identified "server-hugging" -- the unwillingness to share resources -- as a major impediment to Grid adoption. Fiorina estimates that it will take between three to five years for large companies to implement Grids, as they evolve out of their data centers and overcoming both technical and business hurdles.

The financial and human resources that contributed to extending these three product lines -- after the immense success of 9i -- illustrate that Grid technology is very close to Ellison's long-term strategy, which will no doubt be acutely observed by rivals, partners and customers.

As IBM has allegedly spent more than $1 billion promoting the concept of "ebusiness on demand," advertising agencies, copywriters and IT journalists will soon begin pushing 10g in a frenzy of media coverage.

Prepare to see 10g on a browser near you.

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The opinions expressed in this article are the author's alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of GRIDtoday, its publisher, or its staff.