Armonk, New York-based IBM first unveiled its product plans for business grid computing in January 2003 with nine product bundles aimed at the financial, life sciences, automotive and engineering and government markets.
Following that up, the company has now announced seven new product bundles targeted at the agricultural chemical, electronics, higher education and petroleum industries. IBM’s grid products are focused on five major horizontal areas: research and development, engineering and design, business analytics, enterprise optimization, and government development.
The seven new products are spread across four of those areas with Analytics Acceleration Grid and Information Access Grid for the agricultural chemical industry designed to improve business analytics and research and development respectively. In the electronics industry the company has introduced Engineering Design Grid and Design Collaboration Grid, which are both targeted at requirements for engineering and design.
In the higher education space IBM has introduced University Collaboration Grid for research and development, while for the petroleum industry Geophysical Processing and Analysis Grid, and IT Optimization Grid are targeted at engineering design and enterprise optimization requirements respectively.
All these product bundles include IBM hardware and software, as well as products from open source and proprietary third-party vendors aimed at grid computing or specific horizontal and vertical markets. To improve the range of products provided IBM has brought together a range of partners to develop what it calls the IBM grid ecosystem initiative.
Members include Cisco Systems Inc, which is working with IBM to develop grid services for storage area networks based on Cisco’s multi-layer storage networking infrastructure. Cisco plans to enhance its MDS 9000 SAN switches to enable globally scalable access to data through grid environments.
Other ISVs involved in the grid ecosystem initiative include Accelrys Inc, which is developing research and development solutions for the life sciences industry, and Landmark Graphics Corp, which is planning to work with IBM on research and development grid solutions for the oil and gas industry.
One company in that industry that is already making use of grid technologies is Royal Dutch Shell. The energy giant has been working with IBM to create a reusable software toolkit to wrap around existing seismic interpretation applications to enable them for grid environments. The solution is based on IBM’s eServer xSeries servers running the Linux operating system and the Globus Toolkit and has been used to cut the processing time for seismic data.
Another grid customer announced by IBM is Kansai Electric Power Co, or KEPCO, Japan’s second largest electric utility, which is working with IBM to develop an information grid that will enable KEPCO to federate and virtualize data sources across the company. The KEPCO grid is designed to enable information sharing between distributed departments and affiliated companies.
The third new grid customer announced by IBM is Canadian insurance firm RBC Insurance, which has grid-enabled existing applications using Platform Computing Inc’s grid middleware. The integrated solution has enabled RBC Insurance to reduce job scheduling time by 75% and actuarial application processing time by 97%, according to the company. Based on that success the insurance firm is now looking to expand its use of the xSeries-based grid architecture to additional applications and departments.
Source: Computerwire
