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Executive Corner: Application Grid Tops the ‘It List’
With the volatility in today’s economy, we’re seeing organizations striving to improve efficiencies. They are asking how to make the most from their existing IT investments. Because of this, concepts like the application grid are rising to the top of the “It list.” But how do you get an application grid? Is it something you buy? Is it something you do?
To define what application grid is, first let’s describe what it is not. Application grid is not a product, a standard, or even a set of standards. Oracle views application grid as an architecture, an approach, a set of best practices. An application grid approach for your infrastructure focuses on pooling, sharing, and dynamic adjustment of your resources. From a scalability perspective, application grid automatically adapts and moves resources from areas of least need to areas of most need.
The combination of Oracle and BEA accelerated the formation of the application grid approach. Key products such as an application server or Java virtual machine provide the foundation for application grid, but it’s how you organize and use these technologies together in a grid-like way that truly enables application grid.
Our customers are seeing big gains leveraging application grid in their data centers and application infrastructure—greater efficiencies, improved performance, better quality of service, and increased ability to respond as needs change. The results, depending on the business case, range from bottom-line hardware and software cost savings in IT, to better and faster service for customers and improved management and control for IT personnel.
We’re devoting this issue of the Oracle Fusion Middleware newsletter to exploring various aspects of application grid. We’ll share some customer successes and best practices with you in Going Application Grid: Quick Wins, Improvements and Savings and walk through the key benefits in Three Ways Application Grid Will Revolutionize Your IT Shop. Finally, technologies such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), with its focus on composite applications and reuse, are increasing the need for application grid, which we’ll explain in Greener, Meaner, Leaner SOA on an Application Grid.
We hope you take away some specific tips so you can begin to apply some “gridness” to your organization. You can also hear firsthand from the application grid experts in our worldwide event series, Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum. This year’s tour is visiting more than 100 cities around the globe, so there’s a good chance that the tour will be coming to you soon. We hope to see you there.
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