A few weeks ago, in ISC2005 (Supercomputer Conference), Bill Gates mentioned his vision of Grid computing. According news.com, his vision was to bring the computation closer to the data. The article didn’t mention how and why. Google didn’t yield much else on Gates’s speech.
Even though I didn’t know more about Bill’s version of data grid, I tended to agree. Sun’s Grid----------
For example, Sun’s current Utility offering ($1/cpu day) are rather limiting. It is only suitable for low I/O and computation intensive application. It rules out most application that requires a database, which most enterprise application and researches analysis requires it. There was no option to rent long-term storage such as SAN that are local to the grid. Does the fact that the machines are rented means the software must be reinstalled every time? What if I want to form a cluster with a lot of machines? What speed can I expect from the inter-machine connection? Will they share the same LAN (switch and router)? Are the network shared with other computers that other people rented? In fact, the white paper I read a few weeks ago on Sun’s site suggested something about secure connection to and from your company and didn’t even mention clustering. It worried me.It is true that owning and maintaining machine are expensive and a large capital investment. However, the Sun’s value-added is limited the physical hardware and lower level OS leasing and maintenance. It is hardly a big part of the TCO. The simplicity view of computation power, the remote administration limitation (bandwidth for example), and the temporary nature of renting sounds like adding a lot to the system maintained cost. Sun and Jonathan simply needs to come up with a more convincing story.EGA
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In constrast to Sun's current offering, Enterprise Grid Alliance's "Reference Model"
capture better the complexity of what are required to make Grid a reality for enterprise. (to be fair, Sun is also onboard. The current offering is bad on itself and doesn't necessary capture Sun vision to the future.)Data Grid
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Now, back to Gates’ vision of data grid. Over the weekends, I read a few articles from Jim Gray, the authoritative of Transaction Processing who now working for Microsoft Research. It unveils what had gone into Gate’s mind. Distributed Computing Economics by Jim Gray.
And,
A Call to Arms -- Avalanche of Information by Jim Gray and Mark Compton.Active Database
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My hobby to implement a distribute locks and cache also makes me aware of how hard it is to ensure data integrity all the way up to phantom level. Together with Jim’s articles, my vision of future high-volume enterprise computing calls for modifications. Maybe database will take a much more active roles: applications live inside a database, instead of split to different tiers. It is a dangerous thought. I am also surprise that it is Jim Gray from Microsoft who has this vision, instead of marketing from Oracle. Oracle has been an active advocate of database trigger; it puts JVM into the database since the early days, and added CLI into it recently. But, if Jim Gray represents the unison vision of Microsoft vision, it is more database-centric than anyone else.Tag: clustering, database, grid, virtualization