Grid Data Discussions Are Heating Up

There are many different ways to slice, dice and meter the progress of Grid in the commercial world... but perhaps none more important than Grid's ability to handle data management requirements in enterprise production environments.

Last month's EMC acquisition of Acxiom's Grid software was an eye opener for the commercial world that Grid's "not just about raw compute horsepower." The data side of the Grid discussions should continue to heat up in 2006.

Grid does not have a long legacy of dealing with relational data. As Carl Kesselman explains this month: "...science data tends not to exist in databases. A lot of science data is not relational. It tends to be more file-oriented data." Relational data - and the ability to reconcile relational databases - is critical for enterprise Grid.

There are still questions about how exactly the Grid world will work with the storage virtualization world to get the data where it needs to be when it needs to be there. As XenSource CTO, Simon Crosby, says in this month's interview: "The Grids I've seen in action don't deal with complex storage architectures -- the data sets are local to the computation or are made available from a centralized server. But for a broader class of enterprise applications, the storage problem must be addressed. Many applications are now interlinked... for example, a Web service today is composed of a Web server, an app server, and a database."

But for every pitfall and question mark around Grid's readiness for prime time enterprise data management requirements there is an effort going on today in the open source community, and progress is being made.

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