Special Features:
DELL, EMC, INTEL, ORACLE LAUNCH 'PROJECT MegaGrid'
In an effort to develop a standard approach to building and deploying an
enterprise Grid computing infrastructure, Dell Inc, EMC Corp, Intel Corpand
Oracle announced they have collaborated to jointly form "Project MegaGrid."
The four companies are combining certain core technologies and technical
resources to ease the burden of integration for their customers, and to
develop a complete enterprise Grid computing solution that outperforms
traditional SMP offerings at a fraction of the cost.
The initial phase of Project MegaGrid is focused on designing, testing and
documenting industry standard best practices for building effective enterprise
Grid computing infrastructures taking into account cost and performance
requirements. These practices also include conducting a series of tests for
scalability, performance and manageability of a comprehensive database, server
and networked storage configuration. The working infrastructure is
architected, configured and validated at the Oracle Global IT Data Center.
Investment to Deliver Enterprise Grid Computing Best Practices
Each Project MegaGrid sponsor invested technical resources to develop, test
and validate enterprise Grid computing best practices. Specifically:
- Dell -- provides a complete enterprise-class networked server
infrastructure consisting of dual Intel Xeon and 4-way Intel Itanium
processor-based PowerEdge servers, and their related I/O technologies.
- EMC -- delivers a complete networked storage infrastructure consisting of
EMC CLARiiON CX and EMC Symmetrix DMX networked storage systems, EMC Celerra
NS Series/Gateway Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems, EMC ControlCenter
and EMC Navisphere information management software.
- Intel -- contributes proces sor and server management expertise for both
Intel Xeon processor and Intel Itanium processor architectures, optimization
tools, and other resources that allow for a seamless design integration.
- Oracle -- supplies its Oracle 10g technology infrastructure (Oracle
Application Server 10g, Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters
10g, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g) and is hosting the development center for
Project MegaGrid at its Global IT Data Center.
In addition to the technology provided by the four companies, Cramer and F5
Networks Inc are contributing to Project MegaGrid. Cramer, a telecom
enterprise application software application developer, provides a
highly-scalable commercial application to Project MegaGrid featuring
full-scale data sets and real-world business transaction processing. F5
Networks provides BIG-IP switches to Project MegaGrid to guarantee application
availability and accelerate application performance.
Enterprise Grid Computing Delivers Increased Service Levels
The goal of Project MegaGrid is to enable commercial and enterprise
organizations across all vertical industry segments to take advantage of
enterprise Grid computing. By pooling disparate IT resources that can
automatically provision services on demand, organizations can take advantage
of enterprise Grids to improve their application service levels, to better
manage their systems, and to help reduce the cost of their IT systems.
Commercial and enterprise organizations can begin to adopt Grid technologies
with minimal investment and disruption by:
- Standardizing onto cost-effective servers and storage infrastructure, using
Intel processor-based platforms, Linux and an intelligent tiered networked
storage approach.
- Consolidating databases, applications, servers and storage onto a common
platform.
- Automating daily management tasks so that a single administrator can
simultaneously manage hundreds of servers and terabytes of storage.
Overstock.com Deploys Grid With Support From Project MegaGrid Sponsors
Organizations can take advantage of Project MegaGrid best practices and
offerings today. Online retailer Overstock.com is working with the four
companies to build out an enterprise Grid computing infrastructure.
"Overstock.com runs EMC, Oracle, Dell, and Intel as the cornerstone of our
information infrastructure," said Shawn Schwegman, vice president of
technology at Overstock.com. "As a world leader in Internet retail, finding
ways to drive down infrastructure costs, while still retaining high quality of
service is of key concern. The combination of Oracle Real Application Clusters
10g running Linux on Dell Servers, attached to EMC networked storage, enables
a low-cost flexible Grid Computing infrastructure that can scale as a business
grows. The work these four partners are doing through Project MegaGrid serves
to further simplify and accelerate deployment and provides openly available
best practices to simplify management of Grid Computing environments."
With all this said, however, one must question whether or not Project MegaGrid
is little more than an attempt for four specialized vendors to compete with
turnkey providers like IBM and Sun. After all, those two can provide the
servers, storage, software and processors by themselves, whereas Project
MegaGrid requires four vendors to do the same. Only time will tell.
For additional information about Project MegaGrid, visit the following Web
sites:
www.dell.com/megagrid.
www.dell.com/megagrid.
www.emc.com/megagrid.
www.oracle.com/megagrid.
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