Yet it's no secret that the highest percentage of individual Globus Toolkit developers still hail from academia and science. However, at GlobusWORLD 2005, the enterprise constituency made up approximately 46% of the overall audience, while the "legacy" audience of developers from research and academia comprised the other 54 percent. This indicates a growing interest from commercial entities in the Globus Toolkit.

As the commercial Grid groundswell continues and vendors continue their support of the Globus Toolkit, it will be interesting to see to what extent Globus Toolkit developers from the public sector cross over into the commercial sector. Certainly some of the hardest challenges for enterprise Grid (such as interoperability, security, and mass-scale resource and data sharing requirements) are challenges that the research and science Grid community are well acquainted with and can bear valuable lessons learned.

So which Grid areas is the enterprise most concerned with today? Let's take a look at two interesting statistics gleaned from the GlobusWORLD 2005 attendee survey, and how the latest release of the Globus Toolkit (GT4) has addressed these concerns.

One of the primary concerns regarding implementing any type of Grid computing solution is security. Early on, the Globus Toolkit premiered important technologies for security, proving to be a truly pioneering technology. As a result, the work around GT4 continues to drive the development of web security standards. In addition, GT4 includes initial support for important authorization standards, including Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and XACML (Extensible Access Control Markup Language). These provide businesses with a foundation for building a secure Grid infrastructure based upon well-understood web-services standards.

It is no surprise that stability is the primary concern of those implementing the Globus Toolkit. At the risk of overstating this point, GT4 is the most thoroughly tested implementation of the Globus Toolkit to date. In fact, North Carolina-based MCNC, which tests and deploys advanced networking solutions on its North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN), recently performed some successful test-bed work on GT4 with systems set up across the NC Grid and linked via the OC48 NCREN backbone.

Difficulty of implementation and administration is a concern of Grid implementers whether using the Globus Toolkit or some other Grid solution. It is clear that tools to administer and deploy Grids are needed to fill this gap. One of the results of the study mentioned above was the following observation from Wolfgang Gentzsch, the Managing Director at MCNC who oversaw the GT4 test-bed efforts. "GT4 brings in all the standards and interfaces, GT4 is much more flexible, it brings in the ability to easily enhance Grid towards additional services, like accounting and billing, metering and measuring. Now that a larger part of GT4 is based on web services--it is much easier to interface and communicate with other tools that are based on the same web services standards. As a result, more and more commercial tools will be compliant in the near future with Grid services."

It is interesting to note that "lack of standards" is still an important concern of those implementing or using a Grid computing solution. Again, at the risk of overstating, GT4 is the clear leader in standards of any Grid solution. Basing work on standards and driving forward their rapid adoption has always been the mantra of the Globus Toolkit development team.

It should be no surprise that a primary concern of enterprise Grid implementers and users is proving ROI. The only way to show the real value and promise of Grid computing are by wide scale Grid deployments that generate value. With the new features and functionality of GT4 that make it so attractive to enterprise Grids, the Globus Toolkit will be the ideal vehicle to demonstrate this. When that data begins to become available you can be assured that it will be presented here in the Globus Consortium Journal.

In upcoming issues, this Globus Toolkit Developer's Corner will seek to provide practical advance for enterprise developers on the "front line" with the Globus Toolkit. Not only will we seek to address many of the common priorities reflected in the two different graphs above, but we will also welcome requests for addressing any issues that our readers might like to suggest. Just email your comments to: editors@globusconsortium.com

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