PROCESSORS

The Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA), a consortium created to accelerate the adoption of Grid computing in the enterprise, announced a major milestone -- 25 companies actively participating in and supporting the Alliance's charter. With three new members including Avarsys, Dell and UBS Investment Bank (UBS), the EGA will tap into their Grid expertise to help advance the EGA's goals. These companies join a long list of leading hardware, software, technology, storage and networking vendors that are instrumental to Grid computing development, including EMC, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, Intel, NEC, Network Appliance, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. Avarsys, Dell and UBS will help address the obstacles facing widespread adoption of enterprise Grids by looking at best practices and solutions that are open and interoperable through their work in the EGA's working groups, including reference models, provisioning, security and accounting. "We're extremely pleased to see a surge in membership from a variety of technology practitioners who all want enterprise Grid computing to reach its full potential," said Donald Deutsch, president of the Enterprise Grid Alliance and vice president of standards strategy and architecture for Oracle Corp. "The vast experiences of our new member companies are vital to this Alliance as we create developer and user-friendly Grid computing tools and standards essential for advancing Grid computing." Making Grid Computing A Reality In The Enterprise Member companies spanning from end-users and hardware providers to resellers and academic associations are lauding the opportunities to expedite and promote enterprise Grid computing with the EGA: Avarsys -- First VAR Headquartered in Atlanta, Avarsys provides enterprise Grid computing, clustered and data management enterprise application and infrastructure solutions aimed at providing computing resources that solve worldwide critical and regulatory issues. As the first value added reseller (VAR) to join the EGA, Avarsys is demonstrating enterprise Grid computing's potential in the technology sales channel. "As a VAR, it's essential for our business to have flexible, interoperable solutions to provide our customers," said Todd A. Bone, founder of Avarsys. "Without the EGA, a huge opportunity to bring these solutions to the enterprise would have been missed. We're excited to join the team." Dell Dell, the number one provider of x86-based servers in the United States, delivers customers industry-leading, standards-based solutions such as servers and storage systems that are fundamental building blocks for the scalable enterprise. Dell customers benefit from scaled-out architectures that provide optimized component utilization where costs are minimized and availability and performance are maximized. "Dell champions industry standards to lower costs and simplify operations for our customers," said Winston Bumpus, director of standards for Dell. "Proven standards will help drive overall recognition and adoption of Grid computing throughout the enterprise." UBS -- First End User Member The first end-user company to join the EGA, UBS implemented and operated an enterprise Grid computing architecture during the last two years. With its extensive experience with Grid computing, UBS' technology team knows first hand the importance of mature scalability, tools, policy management and provisioning technology needed to make large-scale production enterprise Grids fully viable. "The EGA is an important forum to see enterprise Grid technologies develop and better integrate to address a broader range of problem scenarios, both from a technical and an operational and management perspective," said Eric Kristoff, IT director of UBS. "We are pleased to have an opportunity to influence the evolution of those practices and solutions."