Abstract
Grid computing has moved out of the laboratory and into a wide variety of
commercial applications. No longer the exclusive tool of researchers seeking
to harness enough compute power for massive computational challenges such as
weather modeling or weapons test simulations, today grids are being deployed
in more traditional commercial computing applications.
In Grid Computing: A Vertical Market Perspective 2006-2011, Insight Research
explores the implications of grid computing on vertical markets and
industries, with a special emphasis on the telecommunications industry. Grid
computing provides consistent, inexpensive access to computational resources
(supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, instruments, and people)
regardless of their physical location or access point. As such, The Grid
provides a single, unified resource for solving large-scale compute and data
intensive computing applications.
In Grid Computing: A Vertical Market Perspective, Insight examines grid
technology, the players, and its industry-specific applications, offering
segmented forecasts through 2011. In addition to an aggregated spending
estimate for grid computing, this report forecasts spending in 14 vertical
industries and four geographic regions. Revenue is also segmented by the
sharing organization, and by the type of resource shared.
Report Excerpt:
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 ingenue 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 ....
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