To drive sustainable business growth, organizations are constantly driving their information technology systems to produce business results sooner and make them available to a wider audience, with improved accuracy and usefulness at the point of need. At the same time, organizations are looking to embrace new computing technologies such as provisioning, orchestration and virtualization and the emerging new standards for interoperability to improve their systems' resilience and make more efficient use of human, technology, and capital resources.
Special Report
Grid computing has been on the horizon for a long time. Some prognosticators say it's the next big thing. But it's SO big, it's daunting for many. This collection looks at the basics of grid as it moves ever (so slowly) closer.
An increasing number of organizations recognize the potential benefits of grid and related virtualization technologies, and they are rapidly beginning to exploit those benefits.
When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts
Published: 04 November, 2004
Grid technology underlies many of the utility models of computing mooted to revolutionise industry. It is being put to use in financial services organisations and in some cases already providing compute power as a utility. Dan Barnes reports.
In the race to come up with the latest collateralised debt obligation (CDO) structure or another kind of derivative, the secret weapon of advantage could be grid computing. Million dollar profits can be earned by banks that reap first mover advantage in derivatives but often they are held back by a lack of raw computing power. Grid computing harnesses unused capacity in a bank’s PCs and servers to get the calculations done rather than relying on existing mainframes or supercomputers. It consolidates and allows a measured co-ordination of computing resource.
In recent years, companies have worked hard to reduce the cost of the IT infrastructure—the data centers, networks, databases, and software tools that support businesses. These efforts to consolidate, standardize, and streamline assets, technologies, and processes have delivered major savings. Yet even the most effective cost-cutting program eventually hits a wall: the complexity of the infrastructure itself.
February 9, 2004
Grid computing is an overnight success that has been almost four decades in the making.
Last month's announcement of the WS-Resource framework, enabling grid resource management with standard Web services protocols, completes a convergence that began with the 1965 introduction of the first multiprocessor computer. Libraries full of bleeding-edge research have since paved grids' way, developing parallel processing schemes to solve exotic and high-value problems.
06 January 2005
Emerging automation tools are making the new data centre more self-reliant than ever.
By Denise Dubie, Network World
The new data centre, with its rapid rate of change and growing complexity, demands software that integrates seamlessly to intelligently automate a range of IT management tasks.
True end-to-end automation in the new data centre would also eliminate the chance that human errors could cause outages or performance problems. Without such over-arching automation, collecting data from multiple sources, making sense of it, putting it into a common format and then knowing what action to take based on business policies will challenge many IT shops in the coming years.
"It will take time, money and know-how about the capabilities available from vendors and those that can be used in-house, but the technology will eventually be available and a culture shift will happen. Automation will mean we can make more services available, at a lower cost, with more accuracy - and that really matters," says Janice Newell, CIO of Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, USA.
Understanding automation resource by resource is the first step in that process.
08 January 2005
Three vendors are battling head-to-head for mindshare of self-managed systems.
Whenever a new technology or methodology seems poised to shake up enterprise IT, vendors hustle to spin the phenomenon in their direction.
One such concept has been the self-managing data centre, often referred to as "autonomic computing," the term IBM favours. Here, the goal is to design and implement systems that monitor themselves, repair themselves as necessary, protect themselves from external threats and even re-route their own resources to best meet business needs. (That last factor echoes the promise of another red-hot phenomenon, on-demand - or utility - computing.)
What is the new data centre?
The new data centre has moved from the conceptual idea it was a year ago to a production infrastructure that today's early adopters are testing and deploying. As the new data centre evolves, all agree that a long-range plan will be based on two ideas. First, the new data centre relies on a new business model, the extended enterprise, which is in itself the basic building block for yet another emerging business model - the global ecosystem. Second, the basis for the extended enterprise's (and, eventually, the global ecosystem's) IT infrastructure will be change management.
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