Autonomic Computing

The business and technology benefits of grid computing are many and varied.

For businesses grid computing can:

• Accelerate time to market

  • Grids help improve corporate productivity and collaboration.

  • Problems can be solved that were previously difficult or unsolvable.

• Enable collaboration and promote operational flexibility

  • Grids bring together not only IT resources, but also end users, clients, suppliers, and other interested people.

  • Widely dispersed departments and businesses can create virtual organizations to share data and resources.

• Efficiently scale to meet variable business demands

  • Grids create flexible, resilient operational infrastructures.

  • Rapid fluctuations in customer demand can be addressed—availability on demand is the result.

  • Instantaneous access to compute and data resources enables the business to "sense and respond" to needs.

• Increase productivity

  • End users can get uninhibited access to the computing, data, and storage resources they need (when they need them).

  • Employees are equipped to move easily through product design phases, research projects, and more—faster than ever.

• Leverage existing capital investments

  • Improve optimal utilization of computing capabilities.

  • Common pitfalls, such as over-provisioning and incurring excess costs, can be avoided.

  • IT organizations are freed from the burden of administering disparate, nonintegrated systems.

  • The overall IT total cost of ownership (TCO) is reduced.

Grid computing also provides the following technology benefits:

• Infrastructure optimization

  • Consolidate workload management.

  • Provide capacity for high-demand applications.

  • Reduce cycle times.

• Increased access to data and collaboration

  • Federate data and distribute it globally.

  • Support large multidisciplinary collaborations.

  • Enable collaboration across organizations and among businesses.

• Resilient, highly available infrastructure

  • Balance workloads.

  • Foster business continuity.

  • Enable recovery and fail over.

  • Increase workload throughput significantly.