Enterprise grid group adds Dell, two others

The Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) on Nov. 30 plans to announce the addition of Dell, UBS Investment Bank, and value-added reseller Avarsys to its fold.

These organizations join current members such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. UBS becomes the first member from the user community while Avarsys becomes the first VAR member, according to EGA.

EGA is a consortium focused on accelerating adoption of grid technologies in the enterprise.

“The focus of EGA is on enterprise grid computing, and we define the enterprise as being public or private organizations who are specifically concerned with computing within or between datacenters," said Don Deutsch, president of EGA and vice president of standards strategy and architecture at Oracle, on Tuesday.

Noting grid’s beginnings in scientific computing, Deutsch said EGA is instead seeking grid deployments in enterprise-class applications, such as ERP, CRM, business intelligence, and portfolio analysis. “EGA is not concerned with solving the human genome problem on professors’ PCs spread around the world,” said Deutsch.

Avarsys, Dell, and UBS are participating as associate-level members of EGA, which costs $5,000 and entitles members to participate in working groups, attend meetings and events, receive newsletters, access documents, and use the EGA logo. Higher levels of membership include Sponsor and Contributor categories, with Sponsor members voting on EGA output and Contributor members able to vote on working group activities.

Dell is not readying any grid-specific products at this time but wanted to participate in EGA because it believes grid is an important activity and the company is a close partner of Oracle, noted Winston Bumpus, director of standards for Dell. Oracle’s Oracle Database 10g platform features grid computing capabilities.

“We believe standardizing particularly around the area of manageability and provisioning of grid-based systems is something that’s important,” Bumpus said.

Founded earlier this year, EGA is focused on five deliverables:

* A reference model to define a framework for grid computing in the enterprise.

* A component provisioning plan to identify a standard interface for provisioning of components such as storage servers, databases, application servers, and hardware.

* Data provisioning.

* Utility accounting, to keep track of resources.

* Grid security.

Not participating in EGA, however, are IBM and Microsoft. Microsoft does belong to the Global Grid Forum, which seeks global standardization for grids, and Globus Alliance, for developing computational grids.