1.1 Commercial Acceptance of Grid Computing

Since our first analysis of the grid computing market published in 2003, INSIGHT Research has tracked the acceptance of the technology as it moved from the research community into mainstream commercial computing. Our analysis, from the perspective of the mid-point of 2006, suggests grid computing has progressed well into the “early adopters” phase of a new technology lifecycle.

At such a juncture in the new technology adoption curve, it’s not unusual to learn of some successes and of some notable failures. In this respect grid computing is no different than any other technological ingénue that reports early adopter conquests but also confesses to difficulties and problems that come from expectations that remain unmet.

In the past year, grid has racked up some notable “early adopter” milestones on the positive side of the ledger, including:

· Several telecommunications firms, including BT and Telefonica, have selected a grid middleware software partner to build service delivery capabilities;

· A number of grid start-up companies have attracted venture capital funding; and

· Many large enterprises now have partial grid implementations or experiments under way.

On the negative side of the ledger, there have also been some disappointments:

· Using grid computing software is still a challenge. The software—when deployed beyond computational grid applications—is still difficult to use, and the dominant standards remain unstable. As a consequence, there are no stable interoperating implementations based upon the proposed standards.

· Although in science and academia there are many large grids crossing many organizational boundaries, most commercial grids remain behind the firewall and are local to a single enterprise location. We see only a few examples of grids across multiple locations within the same company.

Such successes and shortcomings are fairly typical for an “early adaptor” phase of a new technology adoption curve. We are, nonetheless, beginning to see the first attempts to cross the chasm to the “early majority” phase in at least a few segments, including the technical-engineering and pharmaceutical markets, and to a lesser extent in the financial market.

1.2 What is Grid Computing?

Grid computing is a form of distributed system wherein computing resources are shared across networks. Just as Web standards and technologies enabled universal, transparent access to documents, grid promises do so for computing resources. Grid enables the selection, aggregation, and sharing of information resources resident in multiple administrative domains and across geographic areas. These information resources are shared based upon their availability, capability, and cost, as well as the user’s quality of service (QoS) requirements. Grid computing is meant to:

· reduce total cost of ownership (TCO);

· aggregate and improve efficiency of computing, data, and storage resources; and

· enable the creation of virtual organizations for applications and data sharing.

IT analysts are calling grid computing one of the outstanding emerging technologies that will likely form the foundation of a fourth wave in IT, as we illustrate in Figure I-1. This nascent fourth stage of IT encompasses technologies and concepts such as grid computing, computing on demand, utility computing, organic information technology (IT), virtualization, adaptive computing, and ....