SYSTEMS

Sun Microsystems, Inc., creator of Java technology, announced it has joined industry leaders as one of founding members of the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA), a consortium created to develop enterprise grid solutions and accelerate the deployment of grid computing. (see www.gridalliance.org) Sun's grid computing strategy provides the building blocks of grid systems software, data, computation and visualization to optimize heterogeneous network computing. Building successful grids for academic and high performance computing environments in manufacturing and life sciences, Sun takes grid computing another step forward, converging its data center experience with a new vision of grid-enabled commercial enterprise services and capabilities. "Grid computing is the newest phase in network computing. Sun's Grid Everywhere program has found great success in building solution-oriented grid computing environments. The next step for commercial adoption is to better leverage and integrate with enterprise data center management systems," said Shahin Khan, vice president of High Performance and Technical Computing at Sun Microsystems. "Sun is pleased to help drive an alliance that supports Sun's N1(TM) Grid approach and furthers the use of grid technology use within the enterprise." Grid computing promises lower total cost of ownership through reducing the complexity of managing resources, faster business service deployment with a lower risk of errors, and a higher return on assets through improved availability, uptime and throughput. "We see a strong emergence of grid technology into the broader domain of enterprise computing which is why grid is a key element in Sun's systems-based strategy for datacenter automation," said David Nelson-Gal, Sun's vice president of N1 Grid systems. "The N1 Grid System products have been used to create, provision and manage thousands of grids. Our customer experience and our industry standards efforts in enterprise grid computing will provide value to the EGA." The EGA is an open, independent and vendor-neutral community addressing the near-term requirements for deploying commercial applications in a grid environment. Initial focus areas include reference models, provisioning, security and accounting. The Alliance will address obstacles that organizations face using enterprise grids, by looking at best practices and solutions that are open and interoperable. "Although grid computing is already well-established in the academic, research and technical sectors it has yet to gain significant traction throughout the enterprise," said Donald Deutsch, president, Enterprise Grid Alliance and vice president, standards strategy and architecture, Oracle Corp. "In close coordination, the members of the EGA will create open, interoperable enterprise grid computing solutions and increase the adoption of enterprise grid computing." Representing a broad cross-section of leading technology companies, Sun Microsystems, Inc. will join additional founding members -- EMC, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, NEC, Network Appliance, and Oracle -- to drive adoption of grid computing. Specifically, the board of directors will participate in and chair committees and vote to approve the consortium's output and core capabilities.