Grid not ready for prime time

By James Kobielus, Network World, 05/24/04

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Grid computing is no empty buzz phrase. In fact, it's a very substantial approach for scaling and optimizing distributed hardware resources. Grids aggregate idle processor cycles, storage capacity and other resources throughout networks, thereby serving client applications with supercomputer-grade performance. Depending on how broadly they're implemented, grids can extend dynamic resource brokering, parallel processing and load balancing to all computers on an intranet, extranet and even a portion of the Internet.

Over the past year, grid computing has become an increasingly prominent theme in the road maps of platform, tool and middleware vendors. In January, several vendors announced development of the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) specifications for grid interoperability. In March, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) established a technical committee to develop WSRF into an open Web services standard. Then last month, close to 20 vendors announced the establishment of the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) to create a grid interoperability reference model, and address security and other issues critical to grids in corporate server clusters.

So grid is starting to mature, as a market and an approach for distributed processing. But the road to maturity is long, and grid computing won't be ready for enterprise prime time for at least another three to five years. Some significant milestones must be reached before corporations can take for granted the presence of a ubiquitous, platform-integrated, standards-based grid infrastructure.

First, OASIS' WSRF technical committee must finish work on its specifications. Then these specifications must be ratified and adopted broadly by grid vendors, including the Globus Alliance, which provides the industry's dominant open source grid tool kit. Other grid industry groups must coordinate their work to provide comprehensive grid reference models, reference implementations, best practices guidelines and interoperability events. All this could take two to three years, considering the complexity of WSRF's diverse specifications and the need to square them with other emerging Web services standards in areas such as security and management.

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