APPLICATIONS

A recent IDC study predicts that grid computing adoption in Western Europe, although still nascent, will reach beyond the High Performance Computing space and will become more pervasive in commercial data centers over the next few years. IDC's European Enterprise Server Group forecasts that grid computing will approach $1.8 billion in server revenue by 2008 across HPC technical markets and commercial applications. The study builds on IDC's server research group investigations into emerging grid technology in an attempt to define and size the present and future grid computing space in Western Europe, in particular the incremental server revenue attached to grid computing. "Corporate interest for the potential applications of grid computing is growing in Europe, as evidenced by the increasing number of European companies taking this journey through IT standardization and consolidation," said Nathaniel Martinez, program manager, European Enterprise Server Group. "Adoption of server computing grids in the Western European commercial marketplace is slowly moving beyond the early stages of concept proofing and testing. Like past technologies, adoption will be highly dependent on successful early adopter reference projects in the marketplace, the perceived cost-benefit ratio of future adoption, and indeed, the increased costs of late adoption." Key findings: Primary customer motivations, adoption scenarios, targeted workloads, and business needs suggest that the grid market is beginning to split into three distinct segments: compute, data, and optimization. Early adoption has largely been in the high-performance computing market for large batch-oriented grids. Emerging opportunity is focused primarily on the pooling and allocation of resources across a variety of business services. While potential opportunity is both broad and significant, there are numerous and varied challenges and obstacles to adoption: Cultural and organizational concerns associated with resource sharing — e.g., the comfort factor associated with virtualized resources for business units. General lack of commercial applications running in a grid environment. General lack of tools and industry standards leading organizations to think of grids as requiring large people and services costs, which lessen any infrastructure cost savings. Security concerns. IDC's study The Western European Grid Computing Server Market Opportunity (IDC #GE12L, October 2004) contains data and analysis of the emerging grid computing opportunity. More info at the link below.