Mainstream Enterprise Grid Apps Still M.I.A.

In research and science, there are applications that can ONLY be delivered by Grid computing. If you want to transport x-quanta of data, or process y-volume of data -- Grid is often the only answer.

But in the commercial world (with the exception of niche examples in the financial services and pharmaceutical market verticals), Grid computing has not yet carved out a position that only it can own.

Grid has been proposed as a "fix" to common problems, and the problem usually pointed to is underutilization. What's slippery about that slope is that underutilization is generally NOT perceived as a mission critical problem. As ActiveGrid CEO Peter Yared points out, "Underutilization is a technologists' problem, not a business problem."

In other words, enterprise business decision makers could care less that hardware is sitting around idle 90% of the time. Hardware is really cheap these days, so if they have to blow a few grand to support an application's peak performance requirements, no biggie. And realistically -- how many enterprise end users are going to stick their neck out and choose Grid computing as the fix to their overall data and resource integration problems (current market numbers suggest that's not happening at a very rapid pace right now)?

In enterprise IT, history has shown that it's new capabilities (read "applications") that drive adoption -- not better mousetraps (read "solutions"). So before enterprise Grid adoption perks up, the Grid community still must offer up the Grid application that satisfies the "how is this going to change my business?" question.

One of the synergies that I believe we should be exploring is more formally latching onto the LAMP stack. From William Fellows (the 451 Group) to Irving Wladawsky-Berger (IBM), we've already heard various pundits pontificate on the benefits of the Globus Toolkit integrating itself into an open source stack that has established enterprise momentum to help drive Grid adoption.

I've often thought that a Grid enabled version of Apache might be a step in the right direction. As an application itself, the benefits of Grid for Apache load balancing and data virtualization resonates with me. And as an application platform, Apache already has the benefit of the "P" languages as an established platform for development.

The good news is that there are indeed efforts underway in this direction such as pyGlobus, the Python interface to the Globus Toolkit. As this matures it will be interesting to see if this will be a catalyst for the development of innovative Grid applications.

And speaking of catalysts I'll say the "W" word. A great many barriers to Grid still revolve around the limited support of Grid on Windows platforms. Given the pervasive nature of Windows in enterprise, the open source crowd, third party Windows application developers and Microsfot themselves need to be getting serious about Grid on Windows Platforms.

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