Startups : Rajesh Ramchandani's Weblog

Its all about Grid computiing - Part I

A few weeks ago, a colleague came with some simple and logical questions any person would ask when you see a lot of buzz around grid computing. 1. What do you mean by grid-enabled applications? 2. How do you determine if an application should be grid-aware? 3. How do I go about making my app grid-enable and 4. what will it take to run my app on SunGrid aka Sun's utility computing platform. I think this is an opportunity to spend some time and discuss about what grid computing is, What are the dimensions of grid, What are critical management components of any grid, How does virtualization play a role in grid computing, What applications would benefit from grid computing, What tools, software and specifications exists to build grid -enabled applications and ofcourse what's Sun's strategy around Utility grid and grid computing in general. In short, What's all about grid computing?. Let's start with definition of grid and what is grid computing? Grid computing is not a new term or new technology and has existed in many forms and had/has names such as Utility computing , Distributed computing, Autonomic computing (Microsoft), On-Demand computing (IBM), Adpative Enterprise (HP), Real Time infrastructure (Veritas/Symantec), Dynamic systems initiative (DSI), Organic IT (Gartner), Dynamic IT(Forrester), Enterprise Grids (IDC), etc. In simple terms, grid computing means sharing resources(compute cycles or cpu, data, storage) and virtualizing the computing environment. The idea to match the workloads to best suitable resources to execute that workload according to some policy. In other words, manage desperate resources as a single managed computing resource to improve resource utilization and bring down the cost of managing the resoures. What this type of computing achieves is 1) Cost savings and 2) efficient or maximum resource utilization. So, what does grid infrastucture look like and what does it take to build a grid compute environment? (You could simply stop reading and go to Sun's Grid web site and java.net ) experience first hand how grid environment can actually help you and save you $$). We'll take a look at a Reference archchitecture but first lets understand what are the dimensions of a Grid. Here's what makes up components of a grid: 1. Workload distribution How do you distribute the wokload on the systems which are part of the grid. Distributed resource management or DRM software radically increased throughput in the data centers. The end users can just submit their jobs for processing and how the job gets done is transparent. Traditionally, enterprises have developed their own workload distrubtion solutions or have used some non-standard software. Global grid Forum (GGF) with respresentation from world's leading DRM providres has developed a standard API (DRMAA) in an effort to make interfacing with DRM systems more uniform and portable. DRMAAA provides services such as 1) Job composition 2)submission, monitoring and job controls and 3) synchronization with and analysis of job termination. DRMAA offers C and Java bindings besides others. Sun offers Sun N1 Grid Engine for managing workload distribution. Other players in this market include Datasynapse, Gigaspaces, Platform Computing and others. All these are Sun'S Grid Readiness Offering partners and offer solutions for vertical industries such as Telco, Capital markets, Insurance, Energy, etc. 2. Virtualization In any Grid environment, it is highly critical that desperate systems with different operating systems and storage servers be virtualized in order to really achieve any befefits of cost effectiveness. Server virtualization, data and storage virtualization allows the Grid software or workload distribution software to treat each server no matter what OS it runs, as a resource for computing. Each storage server is treated as common storage and data is shared or transferred from one server to the other transparley. Solaris 10 Containers, Open source project Xen offers great way to virtualization. Other Sun partners in this space include Scalent, Cassatt, Vmware and Datasynapse. 3. Application provisioning Another important aspect of grid infrastructure - Dynamic provisioning of Applications and infrastructure software such as Web servers, App server etc. Depending on the SLAs or policies of service performance, additonal resources can be added to the grid and appropriate applications can be provisoned dynamically. Sun N1 server provisoning system is one of the best App provisioning software available and has built-in integrations or plugins to provison Sun JES App servers, BEA Weblogic, Oracle database servers, etc. 4. Data Access and provisioning Just like Applications can be provisioned on the new or additional resources, data provisoning is equally critical aspect of grid computing. data needs to be moved around within the grid to be made available to compute nodes as and when needed. Common ways to transfer the data is ftp or nfs or high performance file systems. 5. Licensing and Billing New and creative ways of licensing of software are emerging for grid environment. Software providers who traditionally sold software license based on number of CPUs or number of Users are finding themselves in situation where these models won't work on grid environment. Sun revolutionalized the software licensing by introducing Subscription based license a few years ago. Subscripton based licensing of software whether its infrastructure software, enterprise application sowftare or Software as a Service (SaaS) seems to be the most logical way to sell software. Billing solutions are key for Compute grids since compuet cycles are typically sold on $$/cpu/hour basis. Most of the grid vendors or Workload distribution software such as Sun N1GE offer billing solutions as well. 6. Security and Authentication Security is just as important in grid environment as in any enterprise or traditional computing environment. Security is such as vast topic in itself, I won't even attempt to talk about here. 7) Polciies 8) Service monitoring and 9) Service discovery are other aspects of any grid. Having looked at the Dimensions of grid, Lets take a look at the management Components of Grid. Grid Service management - We recently did a webcast of grid service management, which is available at this site Grid Service management incorporates infrastructure and Application management functions and are best summarized in the blog diagram below: Sun offers software and services for life cycle management of business services and infrastructure. N1 suite of products such as N1 Service provisioning system (N1SPS) and N1 System manager (N1SM) can proviion, monitor and manage the grid infrastructure. Features of N1SPS include: 1. Bear Metal OS provisioning (Discovers a new system in the network and prepares for OS installtion) 2. Multi-tier provisioning (OS and Application provisioning) 3. Broad Application portfolio (Support for large number of applications and infrastructure software such as Sun JES App server, BEA Weblogic, Oracle etc.) 4. Configuration comparison 5. Version control and Rollback 6. Role-based access control 7. Software Development Kit to assit developers to quickly integrate N1SPS with their products and also create plugins for new applications. Check out more details and documentation on N1SPS at N1 site Features of N1 System manager include: 1. Provision Discover and provision hundreds of X64 and sparc servers Logically group servers and perform actions on group of servers likc patching them to certain rev of software, patch levels etc. Supports bare metal provisioning 2. Monitor Moniior the OS (Solaris on Sparc adn X64 servers, Redhat and Suse Linux Monior events from the OS and hardware 3. Manage Manage the hardware using Lights-out management ports on servers With N1SPS and N1SM and powerful integration capabilities, ISVs can create unique solutions for grid service management. I will also talk about What Grid-enabled application means and How to grid-Enable any application. In next parts of this blog, I will offer value proposition for ISVs to partner with Sun, to create powerful solutions for solving some complex data-center problems. We'll talk about the Sun Grid Readiness Offering through which ISVs can leverage Sun's engineering expertise, white-papers, training and other resources. I'll also talk about How SunGrid and Software-as-Service business models. In the meanwhile, you want to check out great advantages offered by Sun Partner Advantage program and see how partnering with Sun can open new business opportunities. Start with Steve Borcich's blog on What are you waiting for?..

Posted at 07:30AM Feb 21, 2006 by rrajesh in Grid  |