Dasgupta: Speed is the key

New Delhi, Oct. 26: Oracle will launch a slew of products based on ‘grid computing technology’ in India with the first product slated to be commercially available next month.

Grid computing enables the use and pooling of computer and data resources to solve complex business problems while utilising all spare computing capacity available with the particular network.

This technique is the latest development in an evolution that earlier brought forth such advances as distributed computing, the World Wide Web, and collaborative computing.

Grid computing harnesses an array of machines and other resources to rapidly process and solve problems more than the capacity available to meet it in an organisation or department. It thus helps organisations utilise their IT infrastructure to the maximum potential.

Shekhar Dasgupta, managing director of Oracle India, said, “Academic and government researchers have used it for several years to solve large-scale problems. Oracle is making this technology commercially available to enterprises.”

“We feel grid technology will pick up phenomenally in India because spending less money on IT is compelling business proposition. Grid computing, with its emphasis on lowering the cost of IT, is attractive to companies of all sizes, including the mid-market, which forms a significant proportion of our customers,” said Dasgupta

Grid computing is aligned with capabilities and technologies that Oracle has been developing for 14 years. “We have always tried to bring down the cost of computing through grid computing which is a logical step from where we were with our Oracle9i Real Application Clusters. With the Grid technology we have taken a quantum leap ahead in terms of what our customers can derive from their technology investments,” he said.

Oracle’s integrated grid software infrastructure comprises the Oracle Database10g, Oracle Enterprise Manager10g and Oracle Application Server10g.

Oracle has surrounded the grid-enabled layers with a management console called Grid Control. The availability of Oracle products based on grid technology is the latest evolution which aims to help enterprises bring in massive improvements in the economics of computing, the company claimed.

Grid computing technology may seem relevant for large companies but it has benefits at different levels of businesses. The economics of grid computing have moved away from single huge computers to load balanced resources.

“It helps to lower the total cost of computing, freeing resources and money to do other things, like investing in core differentiators for their business, taking inefficiencies out of the system. We see grid computing to become a critical component of IT infrastructure,” he said.