Grid Computing News : SES: The Cloud And The New Utility Companies

In a keynote address here at the Search Engine Strategies conference, journalist and author Nicholas Carr outlined a vision of an IT economy that stands on the cusp of a transformation more sweeping than the introduction of the mainframe or even the personal computer. "I think we are at a major turning point in the history of computing," Carr said. "The change we're starting with today is even broader than the PC revolution." That change, Carr said, is the fundamental redefinition of computing power as a utility, rather than as an asset that companies produce and manage internally. Technology is the mechanism, but, as in any shift in business, the driver is economics. Before companies were wired into the electric grid, they producing their own energy at great cost and with tremendous inefficiency.... read more

Grid Computing News : Digipede Opens Up Windows

Digipede Technologies has rolled out the latest version of its grid software solution for the Microsoft Windows platform. Digipede Network 2.1 is certified for Windows Server 2008 and allows single-threaded software to take advantage of multicore processors. Digipede also unveiled two optional packages for the Digipede Network 2.1 Professional Edition. The latest version lets multiple departments share resources and create pools of resources on the fly and use different work queues, 451 Group analyst William Fellows wrote in a report last week. Five-year-old Digipede is self-funded and profitable, with more than 40 customers.... read more

Grid Computing News : GridGain Gains Grid Traction

GridGain Systems has released version 2.0 of its open-source Java grid computing platform. The company bills GridGain 2.0 as powerful, easy to use and built for enterprise use. "GridGain demonstrated that when grid computing is done right, it will be used by a wide range of applications," GridGain founder Nikita Ivanov said in a statement. "Fundamental concepts of grid computing such as data and processing parallelization are extremely appealing to enterprise developers. GridGain employs these fundamental concepts that make grid computing a simple reality that can be easily harnessed right now." New features in version 2.0 include advanced MapReduce implementation; better early and late load balancing capabilities; automatic and dynamic data partitioning and processing co-location; native support for data caching products such as JBoss Cache and Oracle Coherence; advanced scheduling management; and improved runtime metrics, monitoring and management.... read more

Grid Computing News : Medical Center Turns to Grid Archiving

Richardson Regional Medical Center in Texas is using a grid-based medical archiving product from Bycast and IBM to keep up with the growth of medical images. When Richardson's Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) started running out of room, the medical center turned to IBM's Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS), which uses Bycast's StorageGRID storage management software to protect critical data and meet federal HIPAA demands. Richardson is using the Bycast management features within IBM GMAS to configure information lifecycle management policies to automatically store data in the right place and time as needs change, creating a more cost-effective storage solution. "The automatic and efficient replication of images to our second campus and the long-term data integrity that StorageGRID provides were extremely important to us," stated Ron Franquiz, Richardson's chief information officer. "Leveraging existing storage resources was also a key financial factor in our decision." In addition to using its current storage infrastructure, Richardson also purchased 18 terabytes of additional online protected storage, all of which will be managed by GMAS.... read more