Grid's about data management, not just CPU horsepower

Although the tide is slowly turning -- perhaps in large part due to the mass of press regarding the EMC / Acxiom Deal -- there is still a "Grid means raw compute power" feel to a good percentage of the marketing put forth by Grid vendors. I keep hearing the prevalent equation that Grid equals better utilization for high performance computing, which is hardly a problem these days with current commodity computing hardware.

It's not that the enterprise IT guys are stupid and just 'don't get it.' It's that Grid has been marketed to answer problems that aren't even remotely near the top of enterprise IT pros fix list. According to Steve Tuecke, CEO of Univa:

"For many large organizations, their environment includes multiple data centers, each a distinct IT island. While each datacenter may be well managed as far as compute power goes -- and there's no need for better utilization (they're happy to just buy more commodity boxes) -- they're faced with this 'Wild West' in terms of managing the data between those different islands.

There are common scenarios where enterprises have a distributed organization with large data sharing and distribution needs -- anywhere from replicating data between data centers and clusters, to better flow management, to improving collaboration among a distributed team, and better analysis. It's the tying together of these multiple IT islands, without ripping and replacing existing infrastructure, that has these enterprises interested in Grid.

If a company has a group of users in the U.S. with one large set of data, and another group in Japan with other large sets of data -- it sometimes may not be practical to move the data, but it may be possible to instead run jobs against that data remotely. These are the scenarios where Grid has thrived in the past, in research and science -- where you're commonly faced with this decision whether to move the compute or move the data. It's this need to tie together distinct IT islands for computation, as well as the data, with security that overlays on existing, often hairy security environments (without rip and replace)."

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be taking a close look at enterprise data management issues, and including perspectives form other Grid pioneers.