CLOUD
Sun’s Gentzsch on Software Integration Announcement, Grid Computing in General
By Steve Fisher, Editor In Chief --
This morning, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) announced the integration of its software platforms for grid computing and services on demand. The integration of Sun’s Grid Engine and its Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) is a significant move for the company with the “The network is the computer” motto. To learn more Supercomputing Online interviewed Wolfgang Gentzsch, Director of Grid Computing, Sun Microsystems.
SCO: What does this integration of Sun's Grid Engine and Sun ONE mean for the ever-growing grid computing community. GENTZSCH: With the combination of Sun's Services On Demand solution with the Sun Grid software stack, Grid Computing is getting out of its current niche of high-performance and high-throughput computing-oriented applications, and moving into the much larger space of nearly any kind of services on demand, including commercial markets. In my view, this is basically the beginning of the merger of technical and commercial computing, and more. SCO: How have Grid Engine and Sun ONE been doing on their own in terms of sales, market acceptance etc.? How well do you think they'll do together? What types of organizations are going to go out and acquire these software solutions? GENTZSCH: Sun has been extremely successful with both solutions. Sun ONE is an industry-proven solution driving the businesses of many of the very large Web services-oriented enterprises in the world. Sun Grid Engine software, during the last 15 months, has been implemented worldwide on over 5,000 cluster grids, and a couple of hundred campus grids. Additionally, a few dozen of our customers are already in the process of designing global grids. Together, both technologies will provide a wealth of services, combining computing and collaboration in the Grids with the Services On Demand available through Sun ONE. You can either access the grid services through Sun ONE, like any other Web service, or you access your grid environment via Web portal. In the latter, you can do your computations on the grid, store the results in a database, then make these assets available to your business community via Sun ONE. This can be highly useful for any type of organization, depending on how it wants to make these assets available to its employees, partners, suppliers or customers. SCO: Who do you see as the real “power players” in grid computing these days and why? GENTZSCH: The real player is definitely Sun, with its slogan, the "The network is the computer," in the '80s, and with all of the network-oriented technologies from Sun--like NFS, Java, Jini, JXTA, Sun Grid Engine and Sun ONE--which are available today. Many of our competitors are still only in the planning phases for such a range of grid computing technologies. SCO: How important is a global naming specification for grid computing? GENTZSCH: Global naming is key, because the current DNS naming scheme upon which our web is built today, falls short in areas like migration, replication, and failure, among others. We are turning to naming schemes that, for programmers and end users, provide abstractions that make the underlying issues transparent. SCO: Will you be attending next week's Global Grid Forum Workshop in Toronto? Does Sun have anything really hot going on there that the readers need to know about? GENTZSCH: In Toronto, Sun will be represented by several grid experts, who are involved in the Jini working group, in standardization efforts for Distributed Resource Management APIs, and more. And, we'll have a closer look into the newly proposed OGSA Open Grid Services Architecture. OGSA is definitely one real hot item, but the other real hot news is that Sun today is connecting Sun ONE and Sun Grid platforms through standards like Enterprise JavaBeans and XML. SCO: Part of your quote in this morning’s press release announcing the integration of Grid Engine and Sun One mentions, "...the natural evolution of grid computing..." Please share your vision of how grid computing will evolve with our readers. Where do you see grid computing in say, five years? GENTZSCH: Confronting our customers today with an Internet-based Grid solution is certainly not the right approach, and would lead to a disruptive change of our customers' environment. That's why Sun has developed a Grid strategy which, today, starts with the cluster grids, at the departmental level. These clusters already have some of the key features of grids, for example, it's a network of distributed resources, it's about efficient resource utilization, and resource management is key. Sun Grid Engine software provides the solution for these cluster grids. In case our customers have more sophisticated requirements, such as resource sharing (for example among different departments), or managing the resources according to some well-defined policies, then they are at the campus grid level, and Sun Grid Engine Enterprise Edition may solve their problems. The next evolutionary step has to be made when you start thinking about a collaboration with your external partners, suppliers or customers. Then, issues like secure access, authentication and authorization, single sign-on, global naming, and more come into play. This is the global grid level. And here, Sun collaborates with our partners in the Globus Project and companies like Avaki. Their technologies transparently interface to the Sun Grid Engine-managed cluster grids and campus grids. That's what we understand by evolutionary, the contrary of disruptive. We feel very responsible to prepare our customers for this new technology--not through hype and shock therapy--but by providing a step-by-step strategy and solution which grows only when the customers' requirements grow. And this indeed can lead to the global grid, in some five years or so. Like we have one World Wide Web, today, we may have just one Great Global Grid in the future, with the ability to host thousands or millions of sub-grids, cluster and campus grids which are able to seamlessly plug into the global layer, enabled by standards as they are currently developed in the Global Grid Forum. SCO: Is there anything you'd like to add? GENTZSCH: "It's exciting!" SCO: It is. It certainly is. ---------- See Sun Unveils Enhanced Grid Services On Demand for additional information.
SCO: What does this integration of Sun's Grid Engine and Sun ONE mean for the ever-growing grid computing community. GENTZSCH: With the combination of Sun's Services On Demand solution with the Sun Grid software stack, Grid Computing is getting out of its current niche of high-performance and high-throughput computing-oriented applications, and moving into the much larger space of nearly any kind of services on demand, including commercial markets. In my view, this is basically the beginning of the merger of technical and commercial computing, and more. SCO: How have Grid Engine and Sun ONE been doing on their own in terms of sales, market acceptance etc.? How well do you think they'll do together? What types of organizations are going to go out and acquire these software solutions? GENTZSCH: Sun has been extremely successful with both solutions. Sun ONE is an industry-proven solution driving the businesses of many of the very large Web services-oriented enterprises in the world. Sun Grid Engine software, during the last 15 months, has been implemented worldwide on over 5,000 cluster grids, and a couple of hundred campus grids. Additionally, a few dozen of our customers are already in the process of designing global grids. Together, both technologies will provide a wealth of services, combining computing and collaboration in the Grids with the Services On Demand available through Sun ONE. You can either access the grid services through Sun ONE, like any other Web service, or you access your grid environment via Web portal. In the latter, you can do your computations on the grid, store the results in a database, then make these assets available to your business community via Sun ONE. This can be highly useful for any type of organization, depending on how it wants to make these assets available to its employees, partners, suppliers or customers. SCO: Who do you see as the real “power players” in grid computing these days and why? GENTZSCH: The real player is definitely Sun, with its slogan, the "The network is the computer," in the '80s, and with all of the network-oriented technologies from Sun--like NFS, Java, Jini, JXTA, Sun Grid Engine and Sun ONE--which are available today. Many of our competitors are still only in the planning phases for such a range of grid computing technologies. SCO: How important is a global naming specification for grid computing? GENTZSCH: Global naming is key, because the current DNS naming scheme upon which our web is built today, falls short in areas like migration, replication, and failure, among others. We are turning to naming schemes that, for programmers and end users, provide abstractions that make the underlying issues transparent. SCO: Will you be attending next week's Global Grid Forum Workshop in Toronto? Does Sun have anything really hot going on there that the readers need to know about? GENTZSCH: In Toronto, Sun will be represented by several grid experts, who are involved in the Jini working group, in standardization efforts for Distributed Resource Management APIs, and more. And, we'll have a closer look into the newly proposed OGSA Open Grid Services Architecture. OGSA is definitely one real hot item, but the other real hot news is that Sun today is connecting Sun ONE and Sun Grid platforms through standards like Enterprise JavaBeans and XML. SCO: Part of your quote in this morning’s press release announcing the integration of Grid Engine and Sun One mentions, "...the natural evolution of grid computing..." Please share your vision of how grid computing will evolve with our readers. Where do you see grid computing in say, five years? GENTZSCH: Confronting our customers today with an Internet-based Grid solution is certainly not the right approach, and would lead to a disruptive change of our customers' environment. That's why Sun has developed a Grid strategy which, today, starts with the cluster grids, at the departmental level. These clusters already have some of the key features of grids, for example, it's a network of distributed resources, it's about efficient resource utilization, and resource management is key. Sun Grid Engine software provides the solution for these cluster grids. In case our customers have more sophisticated requirements, such as resource sharing (for example among different departments), or managing the resources according to some well-defined policies, then they are at the campus grid level, and Sun Grid Engine Enterprise Edition may solve their problems. The next evolutionary step has to be made when you start thinking about a collaboration with your external partners, suppliers or customers. Then, issues like secure access, authentication and authorization, single sign-on, global naming, and more come into play. This is the global grid level. And here, Sun collaborates with our partners in the Globus Project and companies like Avaki. Their technologies transparently interface to the Sun Grid Engine-managed cluster grids and campus grids. That's what we understand by evolutionary, the contrary of disruptive. We feel very responsible to prepare our customers for this new technology--not through hype and shock therapy--but by providing a step-by-step strategy and solution which grows only when the customers' requirements grow. And this indeed can lead to the global grid, in some five years or so. Like we have one World Wide Web, today, we may have just one Great Global Grid in the future, with the ability to host thousands or millions of sub-grids, cluster and campus grids which are able to seamlessly plug into the global layer, enabled by standards as they are currently developed in the Global Grid Forum. SCO: Is there anything you'd like to add? GENTZSCH: "It's exciting!" SCO: It is. It certainly is. ---------- See Sun Unveils Enhanced Grid Services On Demand for additional information.
