IBM announced a range of government and corporate customers
for its grid technology, as IT managers and researchers gathered
last week at a major grid conference in Brussels,
Belgium.
Auto industry manufacturer Karmann has rolled out a grid
implementation based on a Linux cluster of 116 IBM eServer xSeries
x335s. It is being used to accelerate business processes including
engineering simulation, design and crash test analysis.
Five other corporate users and the US Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) were also highlighted as IBM said that grid computing
was now a commercially viable technology.
The EPA is using IBM's Grid Toolbox, Red Hat's Linux Enterprise 2.1
and IBM's pSeries of supercomputers to carry out improved air
quality modelling.
An enterprise grid is a form of datacentre computing where low-cost
servers are clustered to provide a scalable server farm. This
allows extra processing power to be added or taken away by the
addition or removal of servers.
The 12th Global Grid Forum conference brought together people who
have been experimenting with grids and grid middleware for a number
of years, and are defining best practices and standards for
enterprise grid computing. The event united grid veterans from
automotive, financial, pharmaceutical, aerospace and other
industries.
A Global Grid Forum statement said, "Organisations are realising
that grid computing is moving past the 'hype'. Grid computing in
commercial and research organisations is making an impact through
business process improvement, reduced cycle time and increased
utilisation of IT resources."
Rob Hailstone, research director at analyst firm IDC, said Oracle
which, like IBM, has been heavily promoting grid computing, had
powerful products.
"Oracle's grid manager certainly looks as though it is effective at
making the best use of resources that are given to the Oracle
environment," he said.
IBM needed to develop technology so that small and medium-sized
enterprises could take advantage of grid computing, he added.
"To take the initiative, IBM needs to make it easier, particularly
for SMEs, to put in a virtualisation layer that can share resources
across apps regardless of technology," said Hailstone.