Grid is "ready for prime time"

The words on the lips of many attendees at this year's CA World event in Las Vegas were 'grid', 'utility' and 'on-demand'.

And while attendees who also made last year's conference may feel more than a slight twinge of deja vu this year they were being spoken with far greater conviction.

Conference attendees were told the 'get what you need and pay for what you use' computing model of on-demand and the scalability of grid are now "ready for prime time" and according to the company's CTO, Yogesh Gupta, the switch to grid is simply an issue of common sense - when, rather than if.

But Gupta told silicon.com we shouldn't expect change to be immediate.

"IT is not going to change overnight," he said, predicting it will be three to five years before we see on-demand and grid - two very separate strategies in his mind - becoming major features of IT in the enterprise.

However, he believes grid is definitely ready to emerge from its test bed sectors of academia and research where it has already found an enthusiastic interest in its flexible and scalable potential.

According to IDC the grid market will exceed $12bn by 2007. With that in mind it is hardly surprising that Gupta believes grid computing represents "a huge opportunity" for IT vendors.

CA, HP, IBM and Sun are all offering versions of 'grid', 'utility' and 'on-demand', though there is little agreement between them as to what such terms mean. Gupta, for example, believes these are management issues, while he classifies IBM and HP's strategy as being focused on hardware.

"HP and IBM are doing an effective job of beating the drum for buying their hardware. Their strategies are firmly focused on box churn," he said. But Gupta, whose company spent the whole week talking about 'The Management Age', believes "the only way to get this working is through management".

At the heart of the management theory is the notion that many companies already have the hardware in place - they just aren't getting the most out of it.

For example, a financial institution based on two or three continents may be tempted to buy extra kit to cope with seasonal demand in one office - such as processing end-of-quarter transactions. But Gupta believes first they should consider better managing the assets they already have - such as drawing power from kit which lies idle in Australia as the Sydney staff are sleeping, for example, to service US or European operations.

While niche projects such as the SETI project are the most famous instance of grid deployment, Gupta believes take-up will be "right across the board", citing any business which has peaks and troughs in demand and widespread networks of often-redundant kit.

With on-demand Gupta believes it notion is "the top priority for CIOs right now".

While many vendors blur the line between grid and on-demand, Gupta believes the former relates to processing power specifically, as highlighted above, while on-demand includes all aspects of computing - from mobility to scalability and from security to storage.