While I appreciate Greg Nawrocki's perspective on the challenges associated with growing a community of users for Sun Grid and more specifically the Cool Apps Challenge, and respect his viewpoint; I do believe that there are a couple of things that Greg needs to remember.

1. Grid computing has been around for a very long time, mostly in the academic spaces, but also in enterprises.
2. The Academic / Scientific endeavors tend to frequently push the bloody edge of technology, which means that they are constantly battling for more “resources” to solve their mathematical/relational problems.... Chips are “never fast enough”, “memory is never fast enough or big enough”, “storage...” you get the picture.
3. Enterprises are dealing with substantially more data than they ever have, and the analysis of that data - turning data into an actionable thesis is seen even more strongly as a competitive imperative.... this is taking enterprises into the theoretical realms once reserved for science.
4. At the most basic level Grids are nothing more than a collection of resources, that can be combined to produce a variety of systems, though Grids today address the more data-crunching intensive workloads - some embarassingly parallel, there is nothing preventing a grid of resources from being used to compose an enterprise system substrate, in fact Sun's N1 initiative, Platform's Symphony, Cassatt Collage, DataSynapse, Parameus, GigaSpaces and others share this vision of composing systems from common components (should sound familiar to the SOA crowd).

All in all, Greg is right, having a competition is a mechanism to increase awareness of the Grid's capabilities and applicability but, I do have to ask “why not.” If the killer application for the grid emerges, great, if it doesn't; it has still increased the visibility of the value of utility computing and the impact of a mesh of consistent resources. Are developer contests right for the enterprise? - hey, who knows. Because Southwest Airlines emails out a “Cities Special” do you refuse to fly? And, what about Google's Summer of Code, or the Intel Game Demo Contest let's face it competitions are another form of promotion, and as an effective brand and community building technique to the all important developer community - independent or enterprise (most of us do both anyways).

Most enterprises share a set of challenges; now that we have already seen the impact of platform consolidation on both acquisition costs, and operations costs, and now we're just beginning to address the impact of virtualization on data center utilization (raises it) and operational factors (makes it more complex to manage). Virtualization impacts every layer in an enterprise architecture, and applications need to be better able to deal with horizontal scale/distributed workflows, and the impact of accumulated MTBF. I talk frequently about Deutsch's fallacies; distributed partial failure needs to be addressed explicitly by an architecture, and increasing awareness in this area is important for the entire IT industry. Sun is actively building a community of partners and customers who, in a like minded way want to solve for increased operational / capital efficiency, increased scale, and increased agility - difficult problems, but things that only a large community of constituents can solve.

So Greg, we had to start somewhere! if you know of a better way to get to our end goal of agile-distributed-component based-failure resistant-capacity managed-systems, I'd love to hear it!

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A number of readers have contacted me to discuss my last blog on the emergence of Microsoft and Google not just as online/marketing entities and content service providers, but because they ware well funded/positioned to be mega-ASP's dis-intermediating a swath of independent service providers. The initial inception of my thinking in this area came from Robert Cringley's blog back in November, 2005. In this article, Cringley cites ample evidence of this strategy along the following axes:

• Google is buying up lots of Dark Fiber (note that bandwidth is one of the critical factors in a successful application services platform)
• Google's “shipping contianer” in Mountain View which is said to contain “5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig”
• Google is building data-centers in places where there is cheap power and excellent “rights of way”
• The re-introduction of the Google Accelerator

So I'm not saying that we should support/react to Cringley's conspiracy theory, but we have to look seriously at “someone” doing this, because the opportunity is just too lucrative not to explore. All of a sudden, small self contained data centers start cropping up in macro-level packaged solutions, located at/near power sub-stations which are also frequently co-located with networking rights of way... and Google prepares to deliver it's services very, very close to the consumers... and that proximity can lend tremendous contextual benefit to the service mix (demographically aligned) as well as doing it at prices that traditional competitors cannot touch.

To me, the exceedingly interesting Computer Science aspect of this work is the establishment of a new layer within the traditional IT infrastructure - the Network Operating System, which, like failed attempts at NUMA systems, may finally hold the reliability, serviceability and scalability benefits that could allow one to run an orchestrated service on a “grid” of computers, just as they used to run in “user space” on a single computer - the promise of Java (for homogeneity) and SOA (for dynamic orchestration and late binding), realized.

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An article, published on 5/5 at Fortune.com seems to be a harbinger of something either interesting or sinister happening in the Internet/2 realm. Here we have Google which makes the majority (like 98+%) of their revenue through advertising moving to take on a large role in information meta-indexing and even data management. And then we have Microsoft, who sells software with 95% of their revenue from the sale of “old-economy” shrink wrapped software, also moving to use data management & storage as a mechanism to build stickyness into their service economy (and I might add to execute on a defensive strategy against Google and the Free/Open-Software movements).

If you look at the cost of operating a data-center, they tend to get organized into a couple of categories:

1. Facilities expenses: dominated by power and bandwidth
2. Operational expense: dominated by labor
3. Capital expense: increasingly dominated by data management systems but also by computers
4. Software expense (sometimes capitalized): dominated again by in typical order: data management systems, vertical integration software, and infrastructure middleware

There are different strategies employed by different kinds of hosting, hardware, infrastructure software vendors to minimize these costs either within category or by trying to integrate capabilities and therefore uses systemic engineering approaches to minimize total cost. If one looks at Google, for example, they run their own data centers which allows them to maximize the interaction between compute/storage density and the facility costs (they control all the variables in 1/2/3 above - the typical IT charges), as well as rolling their own OS image, middleware software, and even File Systems (GFS) to manage 2/3/4. Microsoft, on the other hand, with their core business in engineering hyper-integration of 4 to reduce costs, needs to understand the impact of doing 1,2,3 on their existing channel and determine whether they can afford to do the focussed engineering to do the feature reduced / reliability enhanced engineering around their integrated software stack to achieve 1,2,3.

What is interesting to me is the yet undefined intersection of business data stores, and the online shared data sets (see Microsoft's Map the world in real-time initiative). This is to say the information economy is built around the premise that those who can can have the best information (or process information the most accurately and efficiently) will have more value than other category players. So if we start having these data centers (note the term data centers is very accurate here), built through advertising $'s, at what point do the “owners” of this data, or potentially more importantly the data's relationships begin to control a macro-economy, able to exploit this ownership to incredible, even monopolistic possibility.

I have to say, and it should come as no surprise, that the notion of utility data centers which aggregate demand against a shared physical plant does offer the possibility of democratized computing. Utility Data Centers effectively level the playing field between those who have capital and those that don't. By creating an open-marketplace in which the efficient use of assets, and the “value” of the services that one develops enables a small player to expose their innovation and compete successfully against the large players. With the recent moves by Microsoft and Google, one has to wonder if this is yet another emerging market where people fail to recognize the potential for monopoly abuse until it's too late, until the critical data needed by other “information economy players” becomes owned by a select few, and access to this data becomes too costly to compete.

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