WHILE IT WILL remain more vision than reality for years, grid computing is a foundation of IBM's long-term strategy to help enterprises manage far-flung, distributed IT resources in a virtual but cohesive manner.

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But several developments suggest IBM's vision will materialize sooner rather than later. The company has already infused AIX and Linux with grid-compliant protocols, ascribing to the OGSA (Open Grid Service Architecture), and plans to incorporate grid protocols in middleware, including WebSphere and operating systems next year. To that end, IBM last week added autonomic features to DB2, notebooks, and desktop PCs. IBM also announced that it would offer consulting services through its research division.

The availability of a grid-like architecture will form the foundation upon which Big Blue can advance its On-Demand strategy. "We see grid, autonomic, Web services as being very important enabling technologies that move clients toward On-Demand," said Tom Hawk, IBM's general manager of grid computing.

The top priority to enable grid services is developing a virtualized scheduler to control workloads on systems across multiple domains. The scheduler would be aware of what applications are running on any given server, and what resources are available. It would also be able to anticipate how those resources could be used.

"Scheduling on the grid is issue one, two, and three," said Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM's software group in Armonk, N.Y. "If you can't schedule work onto systems, then you have no dynamic provisioning capability because the systems find the overlying virtual scheduling service to be intrusive. If you don't solve that problem, you're not going to do anything else."

IBM's vision for grids is to make network computing more like a utility.

"We think [grid and autonomic technologies] will help IT focus more on their business by taking a lot of the complexity out of managing the integration of all their infrastructure pieces," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technology and strategy at IBM's server group. "The grid will let systems talk to each other about resources like computing and storage capacity, essentially allowing them to act as one large virtual system using XML. All the machinery we are building for Web services will help the grid come to market faster."

To make commercial grids a reality, IBM is working to make systems interoperate, integrate, and automate. "We are moving from interoperability to integration," said Ambuj Goyal, general manager of solutions and strategy at IBM's software group. "Once you have interoperation and integration, you can automate business processes."

IBM executives argue that open protocols and open-source code will drive the grid's acceptance among corporate users. This would make heterogeneous computing not only appealing but possible.

But grid computing, is still largely confined to universities, research laboratories, and life sciences companies. In such uses, grids have proven to be a cost-effective and efficient way of sharing research on joint projects.

The eDiamond Project, for example, is a joint effort by IBM, Oxford University and the British Government, designed to help medical researchers better diagnose and treat breast cancer using a federated database that collects and compares information from thousands of databases.

Some analysts are encouraged by the early examples gathering steam, suggesting they signal the technologies are ready for corporate use.

"Grid and autonomic and other technologies under the umbrella around Web services are in fact becoming real and that can be used by companies," said Mike Gilpin, analyst at Giga in Cambridge, Mass.

Most early enterprise grid projects are beginning life as "intragrids," or grids that do not wander outside a company's firewall where IT departments have less control.

IBM officials agree that corporate users' first applications with grids will be basic. "Businesses are trying [via grids] to get more efficiency out of the environment with things like backup and recovery," Mills said.

At this stage, users are concerned about security, scalability, and integration. "We have enough concerns over security now with our Internet-based applications and projects, never mind opening them up to a global grid. I would have to see a detailed plan for how someone like an IBM or Hewlett-Packard would plan to make this all work securely and with my existing platforms," said John Turnbull, a network administrator at Wausau Insurance in Milwaukee.