We had such a positive response to our Grid Analyst Roundup issue in November that we thought it would be fun to close out the year with an issue featuring past interview subjects as the analysts. We posed the following two questions to our past GCJ contributors. 1) What, in your opinion, was the most influential grid story (or stories) in 2006? 2) What do you predict will be the leading story (or stories) for Grid in 2007? Instead of listing these responses rote, we've combined them into two different prose style pieces.

One of the things that I was called out on in our November issue was my prediction that this was a make or break year for Grid. I still think it was a "break year", but not in the sense of a bust. What we saw over the past year, and this was reflected in our conversations with analysts and past GCJ contributors alike, was the breaking down of Grid, and a resulting proliferation of Grid's component technologies. Two specific technologies that were mentioned were virtualization and Grid as complex SOA conglomerates that run and scale transactional Web applications.

To expand on those themes and dig a bit deeper we interviewed Russ Felker, CTO of RevStor, a company that is producing an interesting SMB targeted Storage Virtualization Project, and Bert Armijo from 3Tera. 3Tera has developed a very intuitive product called AppLogic that easily aggregates deployed servers into a Grid for running transactional web applications.

Finally, we tie all this back to Grid standards in an interview with Steve Crumb of the OGF. Steve has been working to bring the GGF and EGA together into the OGF machine, all while keeping the important ongoing work of these organizations at an all time high productivity level.

So here's to looking back on 2006 and looking forward to the ongoing evolutionary process that we'll see Grid going through in 2007.

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