Oracle empowers the future of Grid Computing

Or how the electric grid is wired. Or the infrastructure your utility company manages to deliver your power. You just ask for electricity and you get it.

Grid Computing-The Basics
In the broadest sense, this electricity analogy illustrates the cornerstone idea behind grid computing-computing as a utility. You shouldn't care where your data resides, or what computer processes your request. You just ask for computing power and you get it. And if you want more, it's there. You'd never build your own power plant, as your power company (usually) supplies more power than you'll ever need; the same is true of grid computing.

This works well for the 'client' side of things. But from behind the scenes on the 'server' side, grid computing is all about three things-resource allocation, information sharing, and high availability. Resource allocation ensures that everyone gets the processing cycles they need and that resources don't sit idle if requests are pending. Information sharing ensures that information and applications are available where and when they're needed. And as with your electric utility, high availability is essential.

As with many technologies, such as the Internet and World Wide Web, grid computing began in the academic research community, as CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, was an early grid developer. Early adopters include financial, energy, and scientific industries. But Oracle sees greater interest in grid computing in all industries, as technologists begin to realize the grid is in their future.

If you consider the Web, it's really about presentation of information over the Internet or your intranet. Oracle thinks after presentation, the next logical step is processing. Processing information over the Internet or your intranet is exactly what the grid is all about. The grid is the next phase of the Internet, after the Web. In 1995 it was hard to see everything the Web would become, but you could tell it was going to be big-that's the state of the grid today.

Oracle's Grid Philosophy-Open, Interoperable, Standards-Based
So where does Oracle fit into grid computing? How is Oracle leveraging more than 25 years of technology leadership and innovation to deliver grid computing solutions today and tomorrow? To answer these and other questions, let's start with the beginning.

Oracle has been involved with grid computing for years, as both an end-user and a vendor, making Oracle unique among competitors. Oracle uses a grid to develop its database product, enabling faster, higher quality development and Oracle's grid allows the efficient allocation of computing resources to specific development projects on the fly, delivering much more computing power-raw processing power-than any other alternative.

The grid gives Oracle quality, productivity, and time to market benefits that add up to a strong competitive advantage. Oracle's use of grids gives us insight into problems grid users face, for a better understanding of how to make grid adoption and use as successful as possible for our customers.

As a grid vendor, Oracle delivers these same user benefits to customers-specifically an open, interoperable, standards-based approach. In fact, Oracle works with the Global Grid Forum to help develop grid standards. The Global Grid Forum is an international standards body focused on grid computing. The forum includes committees and working groups tasked with managing various aspects of grid standards, with participants from academic, research, and commercial companies.

Grid Computing Is Ready Today
Oracle believes the time for grid computing is now. Given the current economic climate, today's enterprises are focused on affordability, looking for ways to cut costs and spend less while doing more. By increasing the efficiencies of processes and systems, grid computing does exactly that. Grids increase resource utilization, promote hardware consolidation, and eliminate islands of underutilized computers. Instead, grids create centralized pools of processing power, allocating resources on a priority basis-when you need power, there it is.

Hardware vendors are selling 'blades'-a circuit board with memory, CPU, and hard disk, designed to take up as little space as possible in a rack-mounted chassis. Blades offer the lowest cost computing power, sometimes as much as 80 percent less than SMP. Grouped together, blades are the most efficient, scalable form of commodity computing. These 'blade farms' are the most cost effective form of commodity clusters, which Oracle believes is the future architecture of computing.

In software, the growth of Linux continues to outpace all other operating systems combined. And while Linux can't scale to SMP, it runs quite well on blades with, say, four CPUs. Commodity clusters work well on Linux, and the larger the blade farm, the greater the Linux price advantage.

But these advances in hardware and operating systems alone are not enough. Software vendors have to provide the right infrastructure to let you run your applications on this new platform. And, this infrastructure has to allow you to dynamically allocate resources to match your business priorities.

Oracle Grid Technology and Oracle9i Database with Real Application Clusters
For Oracle users, the Grid is here today. You can move your ERP applications to these new platforms without changing them, thanks to Oracle's database clustering technology, Oracle9i with Real Application Clusters.

Oracle9i Real Application Clusters allows a group of independent servers to cooperate as a single system, with three primary components-processor nodes, a cluster interconnect, and a shared disk subsystem. The clusters share disk access and resources that manage data, but the distinct hardware cluster nodes do not share memory. Oracle9i with Real Application Clusters provides improved fault resilience, higher availability, and more economical growth versus single SMP.

And with respect to grid computing, Oracle's clustering technology runs on blades or commodity clusters. Other database vendors recommend that their databases run on SMP. Oracle lets you use the lowest cost hardware, and you can run real applications; Oracle9i Database with Real Application Clusters is the only cluster database certified by SAP.

Oracle's database clusters can dynamically add CPUs or remove CPUs from a database while the database is running. You can change CPU allocations to databases in response to load or management priorities, dynamically allocating resources to suit your application needs.

Oracle9i Database lets you share information and messages, publish and subscribe to information, and replicate and copy data, all with a single mechanism.

Oracle portability gives you an easy migration path and protects your investment. You can take an application developed on SMP and easily move it to a Grid computing environment. Oracle9i Database uses the exact same code base on all platforms, ensuring consistent behavior and APIs. You don't have to rewrite your application to get started with the Grid.

Oracle Grid Leadership
The Grid is exactly in line with the long term strategy and objectives of Oracle: Cluster database, commodity hardware, portability, centralization, economies of scale, and Unbreakable. The Grid goes to the core values of Oracle. So Oracle is uniquely positioned to play a leadership role in the move to Grid computing.

We think this next phase of computing is going to offer great benefits, with no tradeoffs. You'll get lower costs, better information, higher productivity, and more computation. We think companies that adopt these technologies and ideas are going to gain a real competitive advantage, and Oracle users can get started right now.


Benny Souder is the Vice President for Distributed Database Development, Database and Application Server Technologies, for Oracle Corporation.