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Three Ways Application Grid Will Revolutionize Your IT Shop
Oracle's pioneering work in grid computing—already revolutionizing database technology—is now bringing profound changes to the relationship between applications and the hardware infrastructure that supports them.
In a traditional application infrastructure, applications are tethered to a dedicated stack of hardware. To meet service-level agreements (SLAs), every individual application must be backed by an infrastructure large enough to support peak demand.
"Such a model builds in waste, since most of the time applications and services are not operating on peak demand. For example, most if not all online retailers provision their systems for ‘Black Friday,’ the infamous opening day of the shopping season after Thanksgiving in the U.S. These systems are underutilized during the other 364 days of the year," explains Ruma Sanyal, Oracle director of product marketing.
“This problem is exacerbated with the SOA-ization of IT shops, which increases the frequency of change to existing services and applications and leads to the creation of new ones,” says Sanyal. Supporting this environment of more frequent change means more hardware, more infrastructure software, more administration, and less predictability.
"Oracle's application grid approach enables this process by pooling, sharing, and dynamically adjusting the supply of hardware and infrastructure software resources across a set of applications," explains Sanyal.
According to Sanyal, application grid computing is set to revolutionize the way IT shops do business in three fundamental ways.
- Meeting SLAs with Increased Confidence
By decoupling applications, hardware, and infrastructure software, an application grid can instantly shift computing power between multiple applications to optimize for most, if not all, applications on the grid—and even accommodate sudden or unexpected demand. This gives IT teams increased confidence that they can meet rigorous SLAs.
Besides freeing up computing resources, the application grid actually automates enforcement of SLAs with continuous monitoring and dynamic provisioning.
- Making Your IT Shop Greener
"The beauty of an application grid approach is that, besides improving overall IT performance, it actually requires a smaller set of underlying physical resources," explains Sanyal.
A reduction in physical resources like servers also means a reduction in the consumption of energy required to service them.
"And, of course, fewer machines, together with automated monitoring, provisioning, and deployment, also enables a reduction in human resources to keep systems running optimally," adds Sanyal.
- Removing IT as a Bottleneck
Business demands often outpace IT, leaving IT struggling to keep up. "The increasingly volatile nature of business demands and SLAs has made agile IT operations a necessity," explains Sanyal.
An application grid enables an IT shop to respond rapidly if, for example, an airline decides it needs to quickly counter a competitor’s price cut. Under the “monolithic stack” paradigm, this would have meant extreme risk as, with a price cut, the volume of orders may increase instantly and significantly, while the response SLA would remain the same. Similar spikes could occur in the public sector during a natural disaster, or in the private sector with a product recall, an overwhelming response to a marketing promotion, or a product launch. With an application grid, the changed application is immediately able to harness resources to support the new throughput and response requirements.
Just as important, as overall demand increases over time, the application grid can scale with unparalleled speed, simply by adding to the pool of resources. Conversely, if a part of the business needs to scale down, the architecture allows for relatively painless retrenchment.
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