Oracle Enters Grid Computer Fray

At the show, to be held in San Francisco Sept. 7-11, the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company is expected to detail packaging and pricing for its new 10G line, which will usher in Oracle's era of grid computing.

The product line will carry the 10G moniker, said Bob Shimp, vice president of database marketing at Oracle. "We are in a new phase of post-Internet computing," Shimp told CRN.

The fact that Oracle's 10G line will take advantage of the grid model is not a surprise,Oracle has been touting grid computing for two years.

Virtually all the high-tech powers are pushing their own notion of grid computing. IBM has its OnDemand worldview, for example. The idea is that in a utility model, computing resources will be available whenever and wherever needed.

What Oracle must do is bring grid computing, now used primarily in scientific niche applications, into the enterprise mainstream.

Business grids will rely on the evolution of technology,blade servers, commodity hardware, Linux and clustering,that is already available but will require a whole new class of management, service provisioning, load balancing and security. To that end, Shimp said, Oracle is working on a new "gridwide" framework to handle those types of issues.

Grid computing distributes workloads across multiple PCs and servers, which poses unique management and monitoring problems that many vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems, are trying to solve through software designed to keep track of distributed applications and information.

Oracle also plans to roll out application management and monitoring tools for the 10G version of its J2EE application server that supports grid computing, an Oracle executive said. The 10G application server's new management features will allow solution providers to automate the installation, configuration and setup of system software on different servers, making it easy to provision software assets.

"Grid is going in everywhere," said John Parkinson, chief technologist, North American region, at Cap Gemini Ernst and Young. "If the applications are grid-aware, it's easier to make it work."