According to Oracle, the grid will be the next big thing
for computing. Last week, speaking to a packed audience of users,
independent software developers and services companies from around
the world, Oracle chief Larry Ellison launched what he sees as a
milestone product, not only for Oracle, but also for IT
users.
Ellison is used to making bold statements that seek to change the
direction of the industry. In the early 1990s, along with companies
such as Sybase and Informix, Oracle played a key role in selling
the benefits of client-server computing.
As it turned out, client-server applications were notoriously
ineffective, prone to failure and, with hindsight, damaged the
reputation of IT far more than the mainframes they supposedly
replaced.
And who can forget the network computer? This big idea saw the
industry rally behind a campaign to rid the world of PCs. Oracle
even created a subsidiary, NCI, to develop the idea of Java-based
network computers as an easy-to-manage alternative to desktop PCs.
NCI fell by the wayside, and while network computers are being used
as PC alternatives in some applications, they have failed to live
up to the hype generated by Ellison and Sun's Scott McNealy.
Then came the internet: products such as the 8i and 9i databases
from Oracle were supposed to solve the problems that came about
owing to client-server computing. Riding a wave of popularity prior
to the dotcom wave, Oracle reverted to a centralised computing
model based around thin clients connecting to back-end servers
across the internet.
But such servers faced a major obstacle: to cope with peak demand,
users needed to buy far more computing power than they would
normally need, leading to vast inefficiencies in terms of under
utilisation.
And now for the grid. Companies including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and
now Oracle are attempting to tackle this inefficiency by providing
computing on demand, where IT workloads can be spread across
multiple servers. Users are thus able to run their Oracle database
on any server, or group of servers that have spare processing
capacity.
It sounds a great idea but there are many barriers. Most operating
systems are not robust enough to provide true logical partitioning,
which means one application can interfere with another. The second
problem is one the industry has yet to tackle: for any model of
on-demand computing to work, software needs to be licensed in a
standard way, agreed by all major IT manufacturers.
Such control only exists in a proprietary environment, and the only
platform that has consistently achieved maximum utilisation is the
mainframe, which is a proprietary system.
We have had client-server, the internet and now grid computing:
imagine what the IT landscape would be like if we could rub out the
last decade of so-called IT progress.