John Taylor

UK

Product Director

Grid computing need not be expensive or complicated. The real key is how you Manage the Data and this requires that you get your "back-end" storage right. Most suppliers of Servers are only too happy to provide the SAN / NAS / Clustered Storage technology but don't fully understand the ramifications of getting this wrong.

If you work with a top Data Management, (don't like the word "storage"!) specialist supplier and don't leave it up to your server supplier it can cost a lot less than you may think and be very much easier to implement than expected.

If you get it wrong -- it is very wrong --especially if you are employing virtualised Server technology such as VMWare and will cost very dearly!

Tools such as Store-Age and Troika in multi vendor array SAN's make it much easier.

There are specialised products even for the smaller organisation with tools such as Intransa iSCSI multiple controller SAN's.

There are many specialised Data Management solutions available now to make Grid Comouting a better proposition but there really is not a single vendor solution that is really practically proven.

So go to a specialist!