Can you explain the concept behind application grid?
Application grid is an approach to deploying enterprise application infrastructure based on resource pooling and automated dynamic adjustment. One way to easily understand the importance of grid is to use a simple analogy - an electrical power grid. Just as energy utilities use a grid to pool power generating resources to meet different customer energy demands cost-effectively and reliably, an application grid for IT infrastructure pools, shares and dynamically adjusts computing resources. In terms of scalability, application grids automatically adapt and move resources from areas of least need to areas of most need.
Because of the grid technology, applications no longer run on dedicated hardware and software infrastructure stack at low utilization rates as they run on shared infrastructure instead. This is architecturally engineered near the bottom middleware stack, so it is important to use products that can take full advantage of an application grid deployment. This makes the middleware foundation critical to an organizations ability to deploy an application grid, and use the resulting IT innovation as an important competitive advantage.
Oracle endeavors to provide the most complete, open and integrated application grid offerings. These offerings provide our customers with superior benefits in terms of helping to lower operational costs and build a middleware foundation that can scale up to meet future business demands.
In the current recessionary phase, how can expense attached to business-critical applications be reduced?
Traditional organizations have deployed various IT solutions from different vendors for their diverse needs. So IT architectures have evolved into islands of software on dedicated hardware.
Application grid enables the use of disparate computing resources to design platforms capable of running multiple applications, hence helping organizations to achieve greater efficiency, reliability and service quality in enterprise application and SOA (Service Oriented Architectures) deployments. An application grid approach to deploying middleware can drive cost savings, enable the successful deployment of SOA and make the best use of existing hardware resources by leveraging virtualization and clustering technologies.
As with Oracle s Real Clustering Architecture for database, application grid allows customers to use standard commodity hardware clusters to provide high level of performance and reliability for enterprise application thus dramatically reduce hardware and ongoing maintenance and administration costs.
What is the competitive advantage in leveraging Oracle s Application Grid technology?
Oracle provides customers with the greatest benefits in terms of lowering operational costs, outperforming their competitors, and building a foundation for the future through Oracle Application Grid. Application grid enables customers to use multiple computing resources to create an application platform to run multiple applications, achieving greater efficiency, reliability and service quality. Oracle Application grid forms the high value foundation for enterprise software infrastructure. These products, including application server and transaction processing technologies such as WebLogic, Tuxedo, JRockit, and Coherence, enable enterprises to outperform their competitors with lowest operational costs and provide the best foundation for their entire Oracle as well as non-Oracle infrastructure.
What are its adoption trends in various industry verticals in India?
Application grids are appropriate for any industry with heavy IT requirements. Telecom companies and e-commerce players will appreciate application grid s enablement of fast provisioning and subsequent capacity expansion. Organizations with high seasonal variation, such as state and federal tax departments that offer online tax filing for example, will benefit from application grid s ability to shift resources between applications that experience peak loads at different times.
How does this technology contribute to the environment and facilitate green IT?
Grid computing decouples demands from resources and pools the resources in a way that allows their allocation across demands to be dynamically adjusted. This in turn helps in better use of servers, as more servers are not pressed into service as and when load increases. It helps in utilization of less space and at the same time there is less consumption of electricity.
What are the key technologies that Oracle brings together for Application Grid solution?
The key technologies that comprise Application Grid include WebLogic, Tuxedo, JRockit and Oracle Coherence.
a) Oracle Weblogic: The Oracle WebLogic application server product line is a Java platform for developing, deploying, and integrating enterprise applications.
b) Oracle Tuxedo: Oracle Tuxedo is industry s premier platform for distributed transaction processing. It provides mainframe-class scale and performance on open, distributed systems for software written in C, C++, and COBOL, and is the premier platform for "rehosting" mainframe applications on mainstream hardware.
c) Oracle JRockit: The Oracle JRockit family of products is a comprehensive portfolio of Java runtime solutions that includes the industry's fastest solution for standard Java. The base JRockit JVM is the world's fastest JVM as shown by numerous industry benchmarks. The JRockit solution for latency sensitive applications, JRockit Real Time, provides JVM response times in milli- or micro-seconds, suitable for the needs of the financial front office, military command and control, and telecom networks.
d) Oracle Coherence: Oracle Coherence is a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware that enables organizations to predictably scale mission-critical applications by providing fast and reliable access to frequently used data. By automatically and dynamically partitioning data in memory across multiple servers, Oracle Coherence enables continuous data availability and transactional integrity, even in the event of a server failure. As a shared infrastructure, Oracle Coherence combines data locality with local processing power to perform real-time data analysis, in-memory grid computations, and parallel transaction and event processing.
What is your vision for the application grid for next-generation foundation middleware?
Application grid technologies are set to revolutionize the way IT functions do business in three fundamental ways:
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.
Facilitating Greener IT: 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.
Scalability: 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.
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