|
FROM THE EDITOR
Get Ready for the Grid
New grid-enabling products from Oracle will change the way you think about computing.
Imagine if computing power were available in the same way as electricity—offered as a utility via a sophisticated grid that provided exactly the amount of power you required when you needed it. You would pay for what you used, and you'd be able to use more computing power when necessary, such as at the end of a quarter when processing financial statements or before introducing a new sales campaign to run complex analytics.
That's the idea behind computing grids—that computing resources be networked together and managed in such a way that they can be quickly and efficiently reallocated for use by different and disparate departments, applications, users, and so forth. It's an idea that's been around for several decades,
but until recently grid-type computing has been explored
primarily in academic settings. However, with the introduction of certain high-speed networking technologies, advances in
clustering and storage technologies, the increasing automation
of system administration, the gradual adoption of industry-standard technologies, and the spread of low-cost blade servers, the concept of computing grids is taking hold in business settings. Some companies are already experimenting with computing grids, and many vendors have begun introducing products and technologies that will support grid computing.
The Brief but Significant Evolution of Grid Computing
Since the concept of grid computing was first introduced
in the mid-'60s, the theory itself regarding how grids might be implemented has evolved. Computing grid theorists first imagined if unrelated, geographically distributed computers could be linked, their computing cycles could be more
efficiently maximized. A researcher in London, for example, could use computing power located in Sydney that would have otherwise remained idle during the night.
Recently, however, ideas behind grid computing have evolved, due in large part to advances in hardware and networking technologies and the drop in costs associated with these technologies. New high-volume processors and inexpensive blade servers, for example, are extremely affordable compared to their high-end SMP predecessors. Instead of scavenging resources as in the older model of grid computing, a business could relatively cheaply build a blade server farm whose resources could be dynamically and automatically allocated to the areas of the enterprise that required the computing power.
In addition to operating on low-cost, off-the-shelf hardware that can be quickly assembled to create a relatively large-scale operation, this vision of grid computing allows for a high level of flexibility in meeting existing and future computing needs.
Grid-Enabling Technologies from Oracle
When introducing the contributions that Oracle is making
to grid computing, it's easiest to group the new technologies into two broad categories:
- New product features that enable data and resource
provisioning. Oracle has produced a comprehensive set of tools and utilities for information provisioning on the grid, helping keep data from multiple heterogeneous data sources synchronized and available. Oracle has also produced tools that will help you establish a grid and determine how resources will be used by a dynamic set of users and applications. In this issue of Oracle Magazine, author Michael Miley goes into detail about these technologies and shows how they work together in a seamless way.
- Those new product features that assist in or fully
automate grid-related management tasks. For this type of grid computing to be widely adopted, system, resource, and data management must become a much more automated and abstracted process. To that end, Oracle has worked hard to develop a new management infrastructure for the database. Many processes are now automated, statistics collection is more sophisticated, and the database contains a new administrator-alert system. You can find a comprehensive overview of the
new management infrastructure in Kelli Wiseth's article.
With all the enhancements in Oracle Database 10g that we wanted to tell you about, we didn't have room in this issue to include an overview of the many grid-enabling features to be found in Oracle Application Server 10g. That's a story in itself, and you can read more in the next issue of Oracle Magazine.
Jeff Spicer, Editor in Chief
jeff.spicer@oracle.com
|
Bookmark
