Why Grid Computing?
Lets take a quick look at some of the problems that led to the development of Grid technology. The trend of the 1990s was toward small, cheap, dedicated servers, and Oracle shops replace a single mainframe with hundreds of UNIX and MS-Windows servers. However, IT shops soon realized that the high expense of maintaining multiple servers plus the requirement to over-allocate hardware was eroding these savings. The problems of using dedicated servers include: 1. Expense: In large enterprise data centers, hardware resources are deliberately over-allocated to accommodate processing-load peaks. 2. Wastefulness: Because each application resides on a single server, there is significant duplication of work, and a sub-optimal utilization of RAM and CPU resources. 3. High Maintenance: In many large shops, a shuffle occurs when an application outgrows its server. A new server is purchased, and the database is moved to the new server. Then the old server becomes available, and another database is m
