Most companies today are using precious little of the computing power available to them through the machines and software they already own. PCs, servers and mainframes all sit idle much of time, while the people who operate them are away from the office or the plant. And as a recent IBM Corp. study points out, this is a significant problem for at least three reasons. First, companies are continually being asked to do more with less, but they cannot seem to break the cycle of increasing infrastructure needs and costs. Second, there is much value locked up in infrastructure that companies would like to release in the hope that it might change the way they do business. And third, there is continual pressure on IT functions to deal with a backlog of projects and to help deploy new business capabilities (Desau, 2003).
Fortunately, there is a solution to this underutilization of computing infrastructure. At present, it is fairly easy to achieve 60% to 70% utilization on a mainframe, but most companies are using only 15% to 20% of all their computing resources across their entire infrastructure. But with the emerging practice of grid computing, companies could attain 90% in the near future.
Grid computing is a collection of distributed computing resources (memory, processing and communications technology) available over a network that appears, to an end user,... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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