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Oracle 10

: Infrastructure for Grid Computing

An Oracle White Paper September 2003

Oracle 10

: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 1EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW

What is all the hype about grid computing?

Today, islands of computing within organizations make inefficient use of resources.Systems are slow to change and expensive to maintain. Grid computing addressesthese problems by providing an adaptive software infrastructure that makes efficientuse of low-cost servers and modular storage, which balances workloads moreeffectively and provides capacity on demand. By scaling out with small servers insmall increments, you get performance and reliability at low-cost. New unifiedmanagement allows you to manage everything cheaply and simply in the grid.

What is new about grid computing?

Grid computing removes the fixed connections between applications, servers,databases, machines, storage – every component of the grid. By treating everythingin the grid as a virtualized service, intelligent systems can optimize resourceutilization and responsiveness.Grid computing is based on five fundamental attributes: virtualization, dynamicprovisioning, resource pooling, self-adaptive systems, and unified management.

What is Oracle doing with grid computing?

Oracle 10

allows companies to begin evolving their IT toward a grid computingmodel. For storage, databases, application servers, and applications,Oracle’s new technology meets the requirements of grid computing. Together,Oracle Database 10

, Oracle Application Server 10

, and Oracle Enterprise Manager10

provide the first complete grid infrastructure software. This paper introduces anddefines grid computing for businesses and describes how Oracle 10

productsimplement a grid infrastructure.

Oracle 10

: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 2INTRODUCTION

Enterprise IT is under continuous pressure to do more with less. Change is constant,and companies need to adapt quickly to stay competitive. Meanwhile, requirementsfor availability and performance increase, while budgets tighten. To deal with theunpredictability and immediacy of computing needs, companies typically size serversfor peak loads and staff IT organizations to handle ad hoc requests.A new model of computing is emerging to address these problems. The vision of thegrid computing model is shared throughout the industry, although some industryleaders have coined new terms for it, for example: Computing on Demand, AdaptiveComputing, N1, Utility Computing, Hosted Computing, Organic Computing, andUbiquitous Computing. In recognition of the significant new capabilities required topower grid computing, Oracle has named its new technology products Oracle 10

.This is the first major name change since Oracle added internet capabilities toOracle8

Vision of Grid Computing

The central idea of grid computing is that computing should be as reliable, pervasive,and transparent as a utility. It shouldn’t matter where your data or applicationresides, or what computer processes your request. You should be able to requestinformation or computation and have it delivered – as much as you want, wheneveryou want. This is analogous to the way electric utilities work in that you don’t knowwhere the generator is or how the electric grid is wired. You just ask for electricityand you get it. The goal is to make computing a utility – a ubiquitous commodity.Hence, it has the name, “grid.”

Origins of Grid Computing

Grid computing was conceived in the academic and research communities. Much likeinternet computing, which grew from the communication needs of dispersed scientificresearchers, grid computing originated from the needs of the scientific community’sneeds to:§ Create a dynamic computing environment for sharing resources and results§ Scale to accommodate petabytes of data, and teraflops of computing power§ And keep costs down

Scientific Grids

SETI@home, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is one of the earliestexamples of a scientific grid. Signals from telescopes, radio receivers, and othersources monitoring deep space are distributed to the PCs of individual science buffsvia the internet. This loose network of small computers crunchesnumbers, looking forpatterns that could suggest signs of intelligent life.

Oracle 10

: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 3

Although the idea of harnessing idle computers across the internet is intellectuallyinteresting, businesses will never want their data or their computing distributed torandom computers. But, just as businesses have brought the concepts of the publicinternet in-house to make

intranets

, enterprises can bring the concepts of thescientific grids in-house to make

enterprise grids

. With both public grids andenterprise grids, grid computing is about harnessing the work of many of smallcomputers.

Benefits of Enterprise Grid Computing

The need for low-cost computing drove the SETI@home innovation. The primarybenefit of grid computing to businesses is achieving high quality of service andflexibility at lower cost. Enterprise grid computing lowers costs by:§ Increasing hardware utilization and resource sharing§ Enabling companies to scale out incrementally with low-cost components§ Reducing management and administration requirements

WHAT IS ENTERPRISE GRID COMPUTING?

Enterprise grid computing builds a critical software infrastructure that can run onlarge numbers of small, networked computers, by combining two related concepts:§

Implement One from Many.

Grid computing coordinates the use of clusters of machines to create a single logical entity, such as a database or an applicationserver. By distributing work across many servers, grid computing exhibits benefits of availability, scalability, and performance using low-cost components. Because a singlelogical entity is implemented across many machines, companies can add or removecapacity in small increments, online. With the capability to add capacity on demand

to a particular function, companies get more flexibility for adapting to peak loads,thus achieving better hardware utilization and better business responsiveness.§

Manage Many as One.

Grid computing allows you to manage and administergroups of machines, groups of database instances, and groups of application serversat low-cost. Grid computing first removes many of the administrative costs of managing a single system by making each database and each application serveradaptive to changing circumstances. Then, the model makes managing manysystems simple, by allowing them to be managed as a single logical entity.

New Trends in Hardware

Much of what makes grid computing possible today are the innovations in hardware.For example,§

Processors

. New low-cost, high volume Intel Itanium 2, Sun SPARC, and IBMPowerPC 64-bit processors now deliver performance equal to or better than exoticprocessors used in high-end SMP servers.§

Blade servers.

Blade server technology reduces the cost of hardware andincreases the density of servers, which further reduces expensive data center realestate requirements.§

Networked storage

. Disk storage costs continue to plummet even faster thanprocessor costs. Network storage technologies such as Network Attached Storage(NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SANs) further reduce these costs by enablingsharing of storage across systems.§

Network interconnects

. Gigabit Ethernet and Infiniband interconnecttechnologies are driving down the cost of connecting servers into clusters.

Power Comes from Software

Although the

newness

of grid computing comes primarily from hardware, the

power

of the grid infrastructure must be embodied in software. The capability of adatabase, for example, to store and retrieve data through an abstract interfacewithout knowing much about the underlying location or structure of that datarequires software intelligence. The capability of an application server to begindistributing work to newly added blade servers without going offline can only beaccomplished with software. By providing software to leverage and control new gridhardware, Oracle supplies the grid infrastructure, and powers enterprise grids.

Grid Computing Aligns with Oracle’s Strengths

The ultimate vision of grid computing is a new way to build data centers and a newway to think about IT. The foundations of grid computing, however, have been in themaking for many years, and every one of Oracle’s strengths and focus areas alignswith and contributes to grid computing:§

Focus on Consolidation

. For years Oracle has recommended that companiesconsolidate geographically dispersed data centers, consolidate all company data intosingle databases, and consolidate all applications onto application servers. With theadvent of grid computing, consolidation means using pools of relatively smallmachines to run consolidated databases and application servers.§

Support for Standards.

The technology industry can be divided into two camps:those that promote a proprietary single-vendor platform, and those that support