VMS invented the term ‘cluster’ (and to a significant degree the underlying concept as well) in 1983, and it never remotely resembled the description which you present above. By the mid-’80s it nominally supported up to 96 cooperating nodes (though considerably larger systems were created in practice), mirroring between nodes using local storage if you didn’t care to use directly-shared storage, and extremely robust operation with *no* single points of failure (clusters have functioned well across distances of up to 500 miles, and test clusters have functioned - albeit with the expected speed-of-light limitations - across geosynchronous satellite links). In other words, VMS has for over two decades supported considerably richer facilities than the current GRID approach does in a manner that extends the single-host paradigm to distributed systems, thus allowing both naive applications designed for single-node operation and more sophisticated cluster-aware applications to coordinate their distributed instances *without* having to worry about their own execution location, or about the location and replication of data, or about coordinating distributed shared access to it, or about creating their own distributed ‘liveness’ protocols (all of which can be handled as they would be among multiple cooperating applications executing on a single host node).

IBM mainframes acquired similar facilities in the early ’90s - they called it ‘Parallel Sysplex’ rather than ‘clusters’. At about the same time they began incorporating more limited clustering facilities into AIX (under the ‘HACMP’ acronym).

Only the lagging remainder of the Unix market and Microsoft have ever tried to pass off simple server-mirroring (which Novell pioneered for lower-end use back in the early ’90s) as a ‘cluster’, and even they now offer larger and more flexible configurations.

So a) the term ‘cluster’ has considerably richer connotations than you appear to be aware of and b) in actual use clusters offer far better support for distributed applications than the ‘GRID’ architecture as you describe it (because it usually makes a great deal more sense to implement common facilities of any real significance in the operating system where everyone can benefit from them than to make applications roll their own). There may, of course, also be room for an additional more loosely-connected configuration (called a GRID, or whatever) for environments with even higher scaling requirements - and in fact HPC environments already implement several such, with continuing development in the open-source community (though whether there’s much *commercial* need in this area is yet TBD). There’s also room for specific applications such as immense storage farms, but their needs are pretty specialized (such that only the most basic ‘GRID’ mechanisms would likely be usable).

- bill

On the storage end of this business, you are correct about the the storage industry killing innovation in computing platforms. Both computer and storage systems designers, I believe, have lost sight of the fundamental objectives for designing systems.

I really think storage marketeers need to be careful about what they are telling the market, before someone calls “bullshit” again. It happened with CERN’s bit error rate study, it happened with iSCSI, now it will happen with RAID or whatever they are calling it.

People in the market are getting smarter. They know that spare pools of disks are the same whether you call them “raid spares” or smad. They figured out quickly that iSCSI was good for long haul and a miserable solution for high utilization applications. CERN published their data integrity is awful.

The real question is… when is the media going to admit storage is dead ?

Today, there are few storage manufactures. Unless there is a shift in markets, there won’t be any small storage manufactures at all. The few small storage companies are learning that have to be vertical application providers, which almost makes them vars and hopefully acquisition opportunities by larger storage companies.

We are seeing the same model emerge in the “for lease” CPU/web services. Most companies that believe they have a need for high availibility computing services probably too small to have the capacity to build and maintain their own grid platforms. The academic and scientific grid platforms still require a high degree of technical expertice to integrate, operate and maintain the systems.

Efforts deploying “grids” in the SMB market has probably been too early in the market’s technology life cycle and the maturity of grid software. Cost effective blade technology is just emerging this last year for these markets. GigE and SAS interconnects have really helped in this area. Once hardware platforms that can support grid software are deployed, we should expect software to migrate in 3-5 years.

One company to watch in this area is VMware. They have a basic software product that can manage service execution “images” and push them between CPUs. They are the real advocates for moving grid concepts and software technologies into the SMB markets. Now, does VMware product follow the current definition of grid computing defined by the academic and scientific communities, like globus ? No, but that’s not what the market needs today. The market needs easy– compatibility with applications without having to rewrite them, operating on currently deployed hardware, working on conventional networks.

Is the term “grid” dead ?? Only from the media’s perspective. On the deployment front, this could be the calm before the storm. If the transition to “grid” is managed correctly, we shouldn’t even notice its happened.

I agree that from a marketing perspective the term “grid” is dead - who, that is sane, would ever call a 2-node “cluster” a grid (although oracle does)?!

Nevertheless I believe the grid idea will live on by the term “cloud computing” that recently emerged (AmazonWS, IBM’s Blue Cloud, etc.): “The grid is dead, long live cloud computing”.