Web Services Grid

IBM and Sun invest in grid computing for global strategic business applications

Grid computing, once the purview of the scientific research community, is making inroads into the business community as both Sun Microsystems and IBM reveal plans to integrate the technology into their Web service offerings.

As mentioned in "Getting on the Grid," (News & Analysis, Oct. 4, 2001), the goal of grid computing is to be able to "share storage and processing power while collaborating on large computing tasks." However, aside from the research community, the strategic applications of this technology initially seemed limited. But grid computing's business value became more apparent with recent announcements by IBM and Sun that grid computing is vital to their Web services strategies.

Sun Open Net Environment (ONE) and Grid Engine software both use the iPlanet Portal Server for secure, remote access to Sun ONE and grid computing services on demand. Businesses then have one global access point to first process data within a grid environment (such as engineering or financial simulations), store the results (preserved as company assets) in a database, perhaps add customized postprocessing (transactions), and then make the information available as services on demand for employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. The information is accessible via a Web-based GUI that enterprises can customize to meet specific business needs.

"Bringing together Sun Grid Engine software and Sun ONE via portal, Java, and XML technologies is part of the natural evolution of grid computing," said Wolfgang Gentzsch, director of grid computing at Sun. "Sun's new grid computing services on demand solution will power today's cluster and campus grid environments and eventually, the 'great global grid.' Customers throughout every sector, including financial services, manufacturing, bioinformatics, and scientific research will gain the ability to tap comput[ing] resources and data as services on demand, relaying the benefits of grid computing enterprisewide," Gentzsch said. The technology recently became available as open source.

IBM also sees a match made in heaven for grid computing and Web services: With the Globus Project (www.globus.org), IBM announced a set of specifications — the Open grid Services Architecture — that will let businesses share both applications and computing resources over the Internet. The new specifications build on XML, Web services description language, and simple object access protocol with Globus-developed standards for grid computing, which are used to locate, schedule, and secure computing resources. IBM's announcement proclaimed that this "work would move Grid computing beyond scientific and technical applications to real business applications."

"This is a breakthrough that moves us to the next stage of computing," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of strategy and technology, IBM Server Group. "The Internet is evolving beyond email, content, and electronic commerce. It is becoming a true computing platform, combining the qualities of service of enterprise computing with the ability to share distributed resources across the Internet — applications, data, storage, servers, and everything in between."

— Michelle M. Young

In this Issue: