What is the benefit and life expectancy of grid computing?

My company has about 150 Sun Solaris servers. We were thinking about moving to Linux to save on upgrade costs. Now, we're hearing a lot about grid computing and are thinking that moving to the grid should be a part of our plan. Is grid computing going to stick? What's its benefit for an IT environment of our size?

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Grid is wonderful, in theory. It involves sharing of distributed computing resources, including application, data, network and disk across dispersed sites and locations. This vision is not close to being there yet. There is certainly much potential out there, in terms of sharing resources and implementing Grid can definitely help at some future point in time. It can also help companies not have to do forklift upgrades every so often, as resources could just use other parts of the grid. Cool, right! I would say, research it, but don't count on it for quite some time. Check out this URL for some more info on grid: http://www.grid.org/about/gc/.

This was first published in October 2003

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