In a previous post, Virtual Service Oriented Grids: Scalable Enterprise Computing, I mentioned how the convergence of three old technologies is facilitating large scale computing in the enterprise. It is no coincidence that there are historical drivers for this transformation. In the IT world in the mid to late 1990s, you may recall that this was the era of eCommerce where most business activities under the sun became "Webified" and even the craziest ideas became capitalized. It as a boom which led to the inevitable bust. Some say it was triggered because work on the Millennium Bug stopped once the issue was "solved". No matter the reason, the momentum was unsustainable.
There was a lot of soul searching after the bust. Only a few survivors remain today, the most remarkable examples being Amazon.com, Google, Ebay and Yahoo. If there is one lesson coming from this period is that an essential element for sustainability is that Information Technology and Business need to be aligned.
The increasing adoption of Service Oriented Architectures or SOA represents the increasing recognition by IT organizations of the need for business and technology alignment. In fact, under SOA there is no difference between the two. The unit of delivery for SOA is a service, which is usually defined in business terms. In other words, SOA represents the up-leveling if IT, empowering IT organizations to meet the business needs of the community it serves. This up-leveling creates a gap, because for IT, eventually business requirements need to be translated into technology based solutions.
Our research indicates that this gap is being fulfilled by the resurgence of two very old technologies, namely virtualization and grid computing. To begin with, SOA allowed the de-coupling of data from applications through the magic of XML.
A lot of work that used to be done by application developers and integrators now gets done by computers. When most data centers run at 5 to 10 percent utilization, growing and deploying more data centers is not a good solution. Virtualization technology came very handy to address this situation, allowing the de-coupling of applications from the platforms in which they run. It acts as the gearbox in a car ensuring efficient transmission of power from the engine to the wheels.
The net effect of virtualization is that it allows utilization factors to go up in the 60 to 70%. The technique has been applied to mainframes for decades. Deploying virtualization to tens of thousands of servers has not been easy.
Finally, grid technology has allowed very fast, on the fly resource management, where resources are allocated not when a physical server is provisioned, but for each instance that a program is run.
Virtual service oriented grids represents the maturation of the three underlying technologies. The coming of age for a technology takes place whenever business, process and standardization become overriding considerations. Virtual service oriented grids rely heavily on standardization to attain interoperability, it is guided by governance at the corporate level, and are very much policy based and SLA driven. The underlying technologies become black boxes, their behavior defined by service level agreements (SLAs).
For any application, the management of the components is centralized, but the components ("servicelets") are assumed to be distributed. The servicelets are fungible and can be integrated in real time by design to allow applications to scale up and down, to be assembled and torn down as business conditions dictate.
In the next few entries we will go through a few examples. The subject is rich enough for a book, which indeed we have written. The book is scheduled for publication in September 2008 through Intel Press. Here is the book preface as a preview: New Book Excerpt from Intel Press: The Business Value of Service Oriented Grids.
