Stories about: Global Grid Forum

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) standards body has officially opened for business, delivering on its commitment made back in June to detail its aims and organizational setup to coincide with the start of the GridWorld conference taking place this week in Washington, D.C.

Mention the word "grid" and most IT executives probably think of thousands of CPUs crunching numbers for data-intensive applications such as seismic modeling and drug discovery. Increasingly, however, grids are being considered as platforms for creating more flexible, efficient data center architectures.

Two former dueling grid groups Monday made good on their February promise to merge with the mission of speeding the adoption of grid technology worldwide.

The Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance have agreed to merge, combining two groups that have sometimes been at odds despite their similar goals to promote grid computing.

Moving grid computing out of the technical and scientific realm and into mainstream business use is going to require development work by vendors as well as the adoption of standards, IT managers and analysts said at the GridWorld conference in Boston.

IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Intel have combined forces to improve open-source grid development efforts and accelerate grid business adoption.

Deploying a grid infrastructure can help companies dramatically improve hardware utilization rates and boost computing power. But the massive resource aggregation and wider end-user access enabled by grids also have the potential to magnify security risks, implementers say.

The Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) was formed six months ago by several major IT vendors to help accelerate grid adoption in the enterprise. The list of members includes EMC, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, NEC, Network Appliance, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. In addition to pushing for grid adoption, the EGA is now developing standards and specifications designed to make it easier to deploy vendor products in a grid environment. EGA President Donald Deutsch, who is also vice president for standards strategy and architecture at Oracle, recently discussed the Alliance's mission and its standards work with Computerworld.

EMC, Network Appliance, Oracle and others have put together a consortium to promote grid computing in the enterprise.

IBM and several other vendors on Tuesday unveiled three specifications intended to converge Web services and grid computing.

Neither Linux nor Intel are new companies, but combining the two will create a "disruptive technology" that will change computing rules and price propositions in the grid computing model, according to one analyst.