One in five companies may deploy grid technology during
the next two years, according to a survey of some 550 database
administrators and developers.
Santa Cruz-based Evans Data asked developers about their grid
plans and found that 12% of the respondents have deployed grid
technology or plan to do so in the next year. Another 9% said they
expect to deploy a grid computing strategy in the next two
years.
"It's still relatively new technology, but the fact that one out
of five are seriously considering it is significant," said
McKendrick.
McKendrick cited Oracle's decision last year to incorporate grid
technology in its flagship database product, 10g, as a major reason
behind the growing adoption of grid computing in enterprises.
Meanwhile, IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky said utility computing
"requires grid because that's the hardware architecture underneath
utility computing".
IDC has found that roughly one in five companies plans to move
to utility computing in the next two years. Specifically, the
survey found that 5.2% have adopted utility computing, 3.5% plan to
do so in six months, 4.9% this year and 6.4% in two years.
Kusnetzky predicted that grid capabilities are likely to move
into corporate IT shops as companies take their basic products and
add grid capabilities in release upgrades. "That's probably how
this will evolve in the market as people will, in essence, end up
with a product that has the capability." He sees grid computing as
the latest term for describing the evolution of distributed
computing.
Grid computing allows companies to use numerous machines to
perform a process or run an application, acting as a single
machine. It can reduce the cost of hardware by improving
utilisation rates while increasing computing power without the need
to add new CPUs.
Adoption has so far primarily been among companies that run
compute-intensive applications such as those used in financial
analysis and medical research.
Patrick Thibodeau writes for
Computerworld