Grid Computing

For many organizations, systems in their early stages of development have a tendency to start up new services in piece meal fashion. This results in individual application server silos as illustrated below. In other organizations, this design is simply due to limited I.T. resources. I know of one recreation vehicle company that would only fund I.T. projects based on this design concept. Today, companies with a long view of their systems tend to migrate away from the application server silo concept.

Organizations with a solid long-term view of their I.T. resources will migrate to grid computing. Those who have done so understand the reduced cost of ownership and greater systems reliability and high-level of disaster recovery. The main advantage in grid computing is the apparently seamless access to applications and data across an organization without regard to specific file server access. The illustration below shows any user having access they are allowed to use to run applications, with relational database functionality looking at the appropriate data files. Simply, this enhances the user experience and improves efficiency of I.T. resource management. For I.T. professionals, adding hardware resources to clusters allow faster implementation of those resources for the user while reducing implementation downtime or operational interference.