As Published In November/December 2003

Setting the Standards

By Blair Campbell

Oracle's U.K. grid program director helps shape the future of utility computing.

Publish or perish. It's a maxim so familiar that it's recognized far beyond the academic world whose rules of survival it dictates. Oracle's Dave Pearson thought he'd left that world behind when he finished his postgraduate research in geology at Imperial College, London, in 1976. In fact, he spent the next two decades in a world ruled by a very different maxim: Profit or perish.

Then, about two years ago, Pearson became Oracle's U.K. grid program director, a role that brought him back to the academic world through his involvement with the Global Grid Forum (GGF), a community-driven process for developing and documenting new standards for grid computing. Pearson cochairs the GGF's Database Access and Integration Services Working Group, and he regards the work as a refreshing change of pace.

"The success criteria are very different," Pearson comments. "In commerce, the success criteria ultimately are related to money, in some respect, or increased business opportunity. In scientific research, the criteria are around the quality of output and ability to publish."

In the past it was science itself that drove interest in the grid; in the U.K., that interest eventually led to the government's creation of an e-science program focusing on the use of computer technology to share resources and collaborate. Soon enough, however, it became clear that industry leaders would need to play a major role in realizing this vision of utility computing.

"People in the U.K. saw there was a deficiency in the grid model, and that was database interoperability," Pearson says. "So they came to Oracle—obviously because of our market-leading products."

Pearson's own involvement came shortly after the British government approached Oracle about taking part in its grid development efforts, and he's now charged with addressing those database interoperability issues. He pursues this in two ways: The first is through the standards work that falls under the auspices of the GGF, of which Oracle is a member. The second is through a collaborative effort, undertaken with U.K.-based universities and IBM, to develop grid middleware, known as OGSA-DAI; test out this middleware; and make it available to the U.K.'s e-science community.

After 15 years at Oracle, during which he had taken on increasingly management-oriented roles, Pearson sees his latest job as a welcome return to hands-on technology. He joined the company after 12 years in the oil and gas industry, coming on board first as a technical consultant and later as a manager of technical groups. In 2000, he was heading up architectural practices in Oracle's Europe, Middle East, and Africa region when the dot-com boom brought him back to the U.K. to focus on business development. When his work turned to grid computing in 2001, Pearson's wealth of experience in tackling data access and integration problems worked in his favor.

"Oracle is very well placed to exploit grid opportunities," Pearson explains, noting that Oracle Database 10g, the company's new self-managing database, has what he refers to as "a very strong grid flavor," and that many important grid capabilities are available in other Oracle products. Oracle Real Application Clusters, for example, puts the company at an advantage in the race to embrace virtualized resources—as that's exactly what Oracle's database clustering technology provides with its provisioning of CPUs, storage, and data.

"Oracle Real Application Clusters is described to me by people who are defining grid standards as 'grid in a box,'" says Pearson. He adds that the lack of a completely defined set of standards for grid computing in the areas of security, workflow, notification, information distribution, and manageability also creates an opportunity for Oracle.

Finally, Pearson notes that the real value of participating in the grid will be the ability to access and integrate data in new ways. Commercial businesses that want to get into grid computing can therefore take heart that an established company and set of products will pave the way. "The real message for people is, if you want to exploit grid capabilities, you can do it today," says Pearson. "You can do it with Oracle, on industrial-strength, proven technology."