[CAnet - news] Grid, Virtualization and SOA

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[A good commentary on the relationship of grid, virtualization and SOA. I
would only add that for the same reasons that companies are adopting and
utilizing SOA as a way to align and architect their application architecture
to support business processes, they similarly need to align their networks.
Hence this is why research programs like GENI virtualization and UCLP are so
important. Some excerpts from gridToday article --BSA]


www.gridtoday.com

IBM's Take on Grid, Virtualization and SOA
  <http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/events/12BOS06A/SN372249/CC996089> 

Grid and  virtualization as infrastructure capabilities can complement and 
  accelerate companies SOA plans. Grid IS virtualization. In 
  particular, extending the virtualization thought to two important 
  areas: workload and information virtualization. There are multiple 
  layers to virtualization, starting from the microprocessor and 
  including server, storage and network virtualization. Grid is a 
  logical extension of virtualization to encompass both workload and 
  information across a distributed infrastructure.
  
  Information virtualization is a similar concept, but for data. If you 
  start moving application and service execution around dynamically or 
  start distributing it more widely, you really need the information 
  (data) that the application requires in the proper format and with 
  "near-local" performance to achieve the kind of improvements in "time 
  to results" or resource optimization that is the goal. If you don't 
  have that information readily accessible, you can expend a lot of 
  energy scheduling and managing the execution and still get no 
  advantage because the application is "bottlenecked" waiting for access 
  to the data it needs.
  
  Finally, SOA is an architectural style that supports service 
  orientation, which is a way of integrating your business as linked 
  services and the outcomes they bring. 

Companies are adopting and utilizing SOA as a way to align and 
  architect their application architecture to support business 
  processes. The challenge today is to quickly assemble resources to 
  respond to new business opportunities and endeavors. The companies 
  that can do this -- and are nimble and fleet-of-foot -- realize 
  incredible competitive advantage. Innovation in terms of process is 
  just as important, or maybe even more important, as technology 
  innovation. Witness what we are seeing with "mash up" applications. 
  The software development and deployment lifecycle is days and weeks 
  now, not months -- all facilitated by the "services" notion.
  
  Recently, BusinessWeek's cover story asked "Is Your Business Fast 
  Enough?" and stated "speed to market is now the ultimate competitive 
  weapon." "we're   witnessing the rise of a new breed of very small and
highly   specialized businesses that are not only competing globally, but in

  some cases seriously disrupting existing business models and 
  paradigms" and it noted a company -- Apex Digital -- that actually 
  generated $1 billion in revenues in 2002 with fewer than 100 
  employees.
  
  So, it starts with business processes, tasks and endeavors, and the 
  SOA approach is an architectural approach around this concept. It's 
  really a business thought and how people, processes and information 
  can be integrated in a seamless and coordinated way. So architecture, 
  the relationship between services and composite applications, and how 
  these facilitate business processes and new business opportunities -- 
  both within an enterprise and across the extended network -- are 
  vital.
  
  Now, the question to ask is do I have an underlying infrastructure to 
  support this agility? Once I've decomposed my processes into services 
  and tasks accordingly, what kind of IT infrastructure do I need? How 
  do I manage it? And that's where virtualization and Grid come in. 
  Services are dynamic. They move around, they can be fleeting and they 
  need to be started and stopped on demand. 

Having worked in the   "Grid" space for over three years, I've seen Grid
move from a niche   associated with high-performance computing to more of an
enterprise   thought. Organizations realize that this abstraction -- or 
  virtualization -- of workload and information across the "enterprise" 
  is a very powerful concept and one that aligns perfectly with SOA.
  
  We always believed that, as time proceeded, Grid would cease to exist 
  as a four letter word, and that it was just the natural way to do 
  distributed computing. The progression and adoption of SOAs and the 
  associated standards, which cannot be understated, have moved Grid 
  beyond its early image of strictly being about compute power to being 
  a much more broad infrastructure thought in support of the SOA 
  principles of integrating people, processes and information.



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