IT Heavies Launch ‘MegaGrid’ Project

UPDATED: SAN FRANCISCO — Four mainstream IT companies are pooling resources
to launch a standardized enterprise grid infrastructure based on their
products.

Dell , EMC , Intel and Oracle are spearheading the
enterprise-focused venture dubbed “Project MegaGrid.” Based in Austin,
Texas, the 128-node cluster of Dell servers runs on Linux with a vision
of getting customers to consolidate databases, applications, servers and
storage onto a common platform.

The plan sharply contrasts with more established grid
initiatives, such as the Globus Alliance, and public grid projects, such as
SETI@home, Grid.org and IBM’s new
World Community Grid.”

Dell Senior Vice President Jeff Clarke said the project was certainly in
its early stages, and he characterized it as a “place for white papers and
how-to’s.”

Jean Bozman, research vice president with IT analyst group IDC, said the
project will eventually compete against HP’s Adaptive Enterprise, IBM’s
e-business on-demand and Sun’s N1 projects.

“What you are seeing is a group approach to standardize, but only on
their products,” Bozman told internetnews.com. “Running a
scientific grid on standard software and Linux is easier because you can
keep adding resources to the project and it continues to run. With an
enterprise system, that gets ultimately harder because there are so many
disparate systems.”

The group said it is launching its initiative at the right time, with
the grid computing market estimated to reach as much as $12 billion by
the year 2007, according to a recent IDC report. Already, Project MegaGrid
has named online retailer Overstock.com as its first customer.

“We are taking the scaleable approach because we’re finding 99
percent of all servers
are 4-processors or less,” Dell Chairman Michael Dell said during his
keynote at Oracle OpenWorld here.

The initiative also slights any enterprise
grid work done in the enterprise by HP and Sun .

Phase one of the Dell/EMC/Oracle/Intel program will take
inventory of the standard best practices in the market
and then design and test one that can handle an extremely large scale of
operation for less money. Oracle said its Global IT Data Center in
Redwood Shores, Calif., will serve as host to test and validate the
group’s progress.

Partners of the consortium said they would contribute their marquee
products to the venture.

EMC is offering the most products with its
array of CLARiiON CX and Symmetrix DMX networked storage systems,
Celerra NS Series/Gateway Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems, its
ControlCenter and EMC Navisphere information management software.

Dell is donating its PowerEdge servers and related I/O technology. Intel said
it is contributing its Xeon and Itanium processor architectures as well
as optimization tools and other resources.

In addition to hosting the
grid, Oracle is supplying its Oracle 10g suite of software Application
Server, Database, Real Application Clusters and Enterprise Manager.

In addition to the technology provided by the four companies, Cramer
and F5
Networks are contributing their respective telecom
enterprise application software and BIG-IP switches.

A Dell spokesperson said Project MegaGrid is still an open-ended
venture and there is plenty of room for other companies like Microsoft,
Red Hat and Novell to join in.

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