Grid Computing To Have A Ripple Effect On SOA

Oracle India is working closely with its SI and ISV partners to educate them on Grid Computing in order to push its offerings in this segment. Seema Ambastha, director, Sales Consulting, Database Technology, Oracle India talks about the Grid Computing scenario in India and initiatives taken by the company to make the the grid architecture popular in the Indian market.

What are the benefits and challenges that Grid Computing brings to enterprise IT?

Grid Computing is the pooling of IT resources into a single set of shared services for all enterprise computing needs. Grid Computing infrastructure continually analyses demand for resources and adjusts supply accordingly. With Grid Computing, enterprises no longer have to worry about where their data resides or which computer processes requests.

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Some of the IT demands that today’s businesses require include support for continual business innovation and change, secure enterprise collaboration to improve business efficiency, controlled handling of data explosion generated by new user technologies like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).

We believe Grid Computing is as significant and revolutionary a technology as the changes brought about by the Internet. The benefits of Grid Computing include flexibility to meet changing business needs, high quality of service at low cost, faster computing for better information, investment protection and rapid ROI and a shared infrastructure environment. Also, Grid Computing aims to solve some common problems within enterprise IT such as underutilised-dedicated hardware resources, unwieldy systems that are expensive to maintain and difficult to change, fragmented and disintegrated information that cannot be fully exploited by the enterprise as a whole.

How has the Grid Computing scenario evolved in India?

Grid Computing has evolved into a flexible option across industry verticals primarily due to the benefits it offers to businesses for consolidation of data and its ease of use. India has been witnessing an upward trend in terms of adoption of application independent features and this could be because of ease of implementation, feasibility in case of lack of IT expertise and better uptime.

Also, the adoption of Grid Computing is increasing in India. It will have a ripple effect on implementation of SOA environment. SOA and Grid Computing go hand in hand to prove a highly manageable model that adds competitive value to any organisation. A 38% increase (source: Oracle India Grid Index IV Report) in the grid adoption rate implies the readiness and maturity of Indian enterprises to invest in modern, flexible and dynamic IT infrastructure and commercial Grid Computing.

Oracle is taking initiatives to make the grid architecture popular in the Indian market. We are working with customers as well as local ISVs and large SI partners in India to enable them on our grid architecture. Our channel partners are also playing an important role in educating customers on the benefits of this technology.

How important are identity management standards to the future of Grid Computing?

Grid Computing offers an opportunity to improve existing IT infrastructures while lowering costs. According to the last Oracle Grid Index Report IV, which was released in August 2006, 45% of respondents believe that grid-based IT infrastructure was inevitable and an equal number envisaged it to become the future of IT infrastructure which will be able to support multiple lines of businesses across an organisation. According to the same report, India witnessed one of the sharpest increases in the grid adoption index, globally, at 38% increase. I would believe, more than identity management, manageability and security features of the database are critical during a grid deployment.

Could you inform us about Oracle’s offerings in the Grid Computing space?

The Grid Computing technologies developed by Oracle include Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware Clustering, Automatic Storage Management and Enterprise Manager Grid Control. These technologies enable customers to fully exploit low-cost, industry standard hardware and storage.

Oracle VM is a related and complementary technology that enhances the benefits of deploying low-cost hardware by combining the ability to virtualise within as well as across x86 and x86-64-based servers. Together, Oracle’s Grid Computing technologies and Oracle VM deliver a complete virtualisation solution for the data centre. Oracle Database is the only database designed for Grid Computing. Recently in July 2007, Oracle announced Oracle Database 11g with more than 400 features.