Grids offer managers more value

Firms gather to promote grids in Boston

IT giants including IBM and Sun were out in force in October promoting the business benefits of grid computing, announcing new partners and customers, and launching tools to make it easier to deploy the technology.

At the GridWorld conference in Boston, IBM inked partnerships with Absoft, which has designed new development tools to aid grid deployment; and with business intelligence specialist SAS Institute, which launched an automated grid management capability.

Advances in grid systems, coupled with the emergence of multicore processors, may encourage a wider range of firms to consider the technology as a cost-effective tool for business data analysis. "If you want to carry out in-depth analysis of customers' transactions, the ability to assign groups of customers to different machines [in a grid] means you can analyse hundreds of thousands of customers far faster," said Dr Jim Goodnight, chief executive of SAS.

This can help to tailor marketing to suit customers' habits, or generate near real-time analysis of transactions to detect anomalies and fraud, he added.

Separately, Sun revealed the first Sun Grid Compute Utility user to go public, financial services firm Prediction Company, which is renting datacentre processing and storage.

Sun also unveiled a Grid Readiness Offer, providing software vendors with access to tools to grid-enable their applications. Also at the event, Microsoft announced it is creating a new version of Windows to integrate better with grids.