By Shailender Kumar, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle India
With the volatility in today’s economy, we’re seeing organizations striving to improve efficiencies. Executives are looking for ways to cut costs. They are seeking to make the most from their existing IT investments. IT departments are under pressure to provide applications that meet volatile demands while also maintaining extremely high quality of service. And while they’re at it, they’ve been asked to lower costs. Because of this, concepts like the application grid are quickly gaining attention. But how do you get an application grid? Is it something you buy? Is it something you do?
Just as the power and utilities industry uses a grid to pool together generating resources to meet diverse customer energy requirements cost-effectively and reliably, an application grid approach for your IT infrastructure focuses on pooling, sharing and dynamic adjustment of your resources. From a scalability perspective, application grid automatically adapts and moves resources from areas of least need to areas of most need. Key products such as an application server provide the foundation. To form an application grid, these products are layered with an in-memory data grid for dynamic allocation of memory across the grid along with an enterprise management system that is capable of monitoring and managing resources at a local and grid level.
It is important to point out that application grid is not an all or nothing proposition. For instance, an organization made its infrastructure more flexible and scalable with a small investment in application grid technologies. In another customer example, a longer-term investment in the application grid approach is lowering its infrastructure costs for a large set of mission-critical applications. A sound middleware vendor would have a number of technologies that help customers evolve toward application grid to enable better sharing of physical resources across a set of application needs for greater efficiency, risk-free scale-out and better predictability in quality of service.
Adopting an application grid approach can help an organization to reduce hardware and maintenance costs too. Instead of maintaining separate large servers for large applications and small servers for small applications, an organization can use application grid technologies to tie a big swath of its application infrastructure together as one large grid from which all of its applications are sharing resources. As such, the computing infrastructure is transformed from merely meeting the peak demands of individual applications to one that can handle the combined demand from all the applications on the grid. The result is a dramatic increase in the efficiency of the underlying infrastructure. In addition, this translates to more freedom for the organization to standardize and templatize its servers, bringing a cookie cutter approach to its underlying hardware. By using this templatized approach, a large telecom company that maintains up to 1,600 servers running WebLogic-based applications, is now able to manage them with as few as four administrators.
Application grid technologies are set to revolutionize the way IT shops do business in three fundamental ways:
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Meeting SLAs with Increased Confidence
By decoupling applications, hardware, and infrastructure software, an application grid can instantly shift computing power between multiple applications to optimize for most, if not all, applications on the grid—and even accommodate sudden or unexpected demand. This gives IT teams increased confidence that they can meet rigorous SLAs.
Besides freeing up computing resources, the application grid actually automates enforcement of SLAs with continuous monitoring and dynamic provisioning.
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Making Your IT Shop Greener
The beauty of an application grid approach is that, besides improving overall IT performance, it actually requires a smaller set of underlying physical resources. A reduction in physical resources like servers also means a reduction in the consumption of energy required to service them.
Fewer machines, together with automated monitoring, provisioning and deployment also enables a reduction in human resources to keep systems running optimally.
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Removing IT as a Bottleneck
Business demands often outpace IT, leaving IT struggling to keep up. The increasingly volatile nature of business demands and SLAs has made agile IT operations a necessity. As overall demand increases over time, the application grid can scale with unparalleled speed, simply by adding to the pool of resources.
Conversely, if a part of the business needs to scale down, the architecture allows for this be done in a relatively painless manner.
In summary, organizations are seeing big gains from leveraging application grid in their data centers and application infrastructure—greater efficiencies, improved performance, better quality of service, and increased ability to respond as needs change. The results have ranged from bottom-line hardware and software cost savings in IT, to better and faster service for customers and improved management and control for IT personnel. By capitalizing on application grid technologies, such organizations have been able to lower their operational costs while positioning themselves to outperform their competitors.
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