IBM will announce new software, storage and servers for Grid Computing
tomorrow, and will also announce plans to Grid-enable the company’s
entire product portfolio.
“Grid computing will take e-business to the next level by giving
customers a resilient, flexible, virtual IT infrastructure readily
available from any location, on demand,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice
president for technology and strategy in IBM’s Server Group, said in a
statement. “By Grid-enabling our products, we give customers the ability
to share computing resources, such as applications, data and computing
power, both internally over intranets and externally over the
Internet.”
Wladawsky-Berger will announce the Grid initiative at the Global Grid
Forum 4 in Toronto tomorrow morning. IBM believes that Grid computing
will dominate computing environments in the future, and has aggressively
positioned itself in the space, including drafting protocols with the
widely followed Globus Project for the integration of Grid computing and
Web services, called the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).
Under the company’s strategy, IBM’s WebSphere e-infrastructure software
will provide a robust reference implementation for the OGSA grid
services standards, the company said. IBM said is working with Globus to
re-tool the Globus Toolkit to be Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
compliant using IBM WebSphere as the reference application server. “This
will allow IBM WebSphere customers to benefit through better use of
grid-enabled network computing resources as they deploy their
applications on Websphere,” IBM said.
Grid computing “enhances Web services by coordinating global
applications and resources at various locations efficiently, regardless
of the underlying implementations and services,” the company said. “Grid
computing builds on the scope of Web services by providing a reliable,
dynamic, and comprehensive infrastructure that brings together
resources, applications and services within and across organizational
boundaries. By supporting grid computing and Web services, businesses
can solve complex problems by utilizing their resources more effectively
and integrating business processes with partners and suppliers.”
By making the Globus Grid protocols available on IBM servers, IBM said
it is enabling customers to plug these machines quickly and easily into
Grid computing systems. To support Grid implementations, IBM said it
will provide the Globus Toolkit on each of its eServer platforms; the
Toolkit is already available on AIX and Linux. IBM said it will also
provide an implementation of the Open Grid Services Architecture as part
of its Grid solutions for customers.
Tivoli, IBM’s provider of e-business infrastructure management software,
will provide solutions that will enable Grid management functions such
as security, performance, availability configuration, operations, and
storage management.
In addition, IBM’s Storage Group has several offerings that will support
Grid implementations, such as IBM TotalStorage products, including those
based on open standards, including network attached storage and the
emerging iSCSI protocol. The iSCSI protocol is designed to transport
data over IP networks via TCP/IP and has its roots in IBM Research
projects dating back to 1997.
These IP-based products will provide
accessibility to data anywhere within a Grid and be able to be
provisioned dynamically when needed, the company said. The IBM
TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server, code named “Shark,” is designed
to handle large amounts of storage for on-line data and removable media
products for meeting the off-line data storage needs of a Grid, IBM
said.
Other key IBM storage technologies will include virtualization to enable
more efficient use of resources, sharing, availability, and dynamic
allocation, and IBM’s Storage Tank, designed to be Grid-ready and to
provide the policy-based and autonomic capabilities to make Grid a
reality, the company said.
IBM Global Services will offer an array of services to customers
considering a Grid strategy, such as consulting services to plan,
design, migrate, implement, run and manage Grid environments, utilizing
IBM’s IT methodology. This may include assistance with architecture,
security, business and Information Technology processes, recovery,
organizational structure, availability and optimization.
IBM also said it is working closely with the Globus open source
development community and the Global Grid Forum standards body. “Open
protocols are essential to Grids because they enable heterogeneous
systems to work together as a single system,” the company said.
