GRIDtoday: Can you give me a preview of what you'll be discussing at LinuxWorld? About what can attendees expect to learn?

MATT HAYNOS: I'll be outlining the relationship and synergies between virtualization, Grid and service-oriented architectures. There's been a lot of visibility and momentum around each of these and what I hope to do is to describe, in a very simple manner, how Grid and virtualization as infrastructure capabilities can complement and accelerate companies SOA plans. Grid/virtualization and SOA are very synergistic thoughts and what I want to articulate is why infrastructures based on virtualization and grids are strong foundations for SOAs.


Gt: Can you give brief definitions of Grid, virtualization and SOA?

HAYNOS: I'm not sure I'm game for defining "Grid", but here goes! At IBM, we try to keep it pretty simple: Grid IS virtualization. In particular, extending the virtualization thought to two important areas: workload and information virtualization. There are multiple layers to virtualization, starting from the microprocessor and including server, storage and network virtualization. Grid is a logical extension of virtualization to encompass both workload and information across a distributed infrastructure.

At a high level, workload virtualization is about separating services and applications from the underlying infrastructure; abstracting the concept of workload execution so that, from the standpoint of end-users or submitters, the overall Grid system appears as a single set of capabilities.

Information virtualization is a similar concept, but for data. If you start moving application and service execution around dynamically or start distributing it more widely, you really need the information (data) that the application requires in the proper format and with "near-local" performance to achieve the kind of improvements in "time to results" or resource optimization that is the goal. If you don't have that information readily accessible, you can expend a lot of energy scheduling and managing the execution and still get no advantage because the application is "bottlenecked" waiting for access to the data it needs.

Finally, SOA is an architectural style that supports service orientation, which is a way of integrating your business as linked services and the outcomes they bring. A service is simply a repeatable business task. For example, checking a customer's credit, or opening a new account.