IT Strategy Clinic

Regardless of whether your business is focused on the IT Sector, you need to be aware of the strategic implications of technology on your business. This occasional column will endeavour to demystify some of the more prominent yet esoteric terms.

Today we look at GRID COMPUTING.

What is it?

Grid computing is a term recently introduced to the marketplace by IBM. In essence it is an approach to squeezing better value from your IT investment. “But how?” you might ask. Consider your usage of your PC. Not just in terms of how many hours per day but in terms of utilising its power to the full. The average utilisation is under 10 percent! Multiply that by the number of computers you have and you will see that you have spent a small/large fortune on a fast depreciating asset that is very under utilised.

IBM is telling the market that it can provide the ‘magic pixie dust’ to enable companies to improve on this situation. Without going into too much detail, IBM has gathered a group of tools and technologies together to enable your PC to perform tasks both in the background when you are using your desktop and in the foreground when you are not. The clever bit is that IBM promises to bundle up all the little pockets of unused capacity on all your machines and so enable companies to run very large (server) sized applications, eg. payroll-processing, without actually needing a separate server. So in the future, when you pop out to lunch (if lunch becomes popular again) your PC will resume the payroll-processing task.

Why do I need to know about it?

IT recruiters  - need to appreciate that this could have a very big impact on the manner in which organisations build their IT systems

General recruiters – need to consider this as a model for reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their IT infrastructure

Caution!

This concept has only just hit the streets. Whilst IBM assures us that it can deliver today, I would not recommend that you should be the first to test-drive this model. Migrating to a grid computing paradigm (it would be rude not to use this word) will require the IT staff to ‘pull up the drains’ from a technology perspective and thus will also be very disruptive to the business.

How can I impress friends and colleagues?

q       Step 1 - Wait until an unknowing victim tries to put you on the back foot by introducing any of the following terms: IBM, architecture, client server, distributed computing.

q       Step 2 – Essentially ignore their comment or question. Smile enigmatically. Remember you are just about to have lunch.

q       Step 3 – Unleash the following: “Whilst I am sold on the TCO benefits of grid computing, I have strong reservations about being an early adopter. What’s your view?”

q       Step 4 – Look smug. Pass them a tissue if necessary.