The Meter Is Running Amok

For CIOs not steeped in the nuances of grid computing, cutting through the hype can seem daunting and not worth the trouble. Most of what vendors are offering is not grid. The list of grid pretenders is long, but it includes clustering, utility computing and virtualization.

Once CIOs figure out whether a grid-computing infrastructure is right for one or more of their software applications, then they have to decide how much help is really available from vendors and how much they want to pay.

Finally, they have to be prepared to hurl themselves against the wall of software licensing. "The software-licensing model is the biggest impediment to grid computing," says Gartner Research's Claunch. "The vendors know they've got problems."

The few vendors who have tried to come up with a formula for grid pricing have ladled on the complexity, according to analysts. "If you look at the formal price sheets, it is a nightmare for the customer," Illuminata's Eunice says. "You can't easily buy software that is intelligently licensed for the kind of dynamic infrastructure in grid."

Yet, alternative licensing models have been suggested, according to Fellows - such as one that would charge for actual usage of the application, not just for the absolute number of CPUs available in the grid. But these new models require vendors to embrace new forms of metering and billing mechanisms to track customer usage by time, users per month or transaction volume. Few mechanisms exist to measure the kind of application and component usage and licence tracking that grid implies, although some are being tested. Even if those applications prove to be successful, there needs to be a huge leap of faith between the vendor and customer. Customers have to believe that they won't be charged for time they aren't using, and vendors have to believe that their customers aren't somehow sneaking CPUs or users past monitoring tools. A few big companies with big vendor clout have been able to negotiate individual pricing and monitoring models, says Illuminata's Eunice, "but for medium and small companies, it's still too early".

Fellows says that CIOs he has spoken with aren't asking their vendors to reinvent the wheel yet. They would be content with some modifications to the time-based usage models that they already have. "If their [vendor] made some incremental changes to licence models, real simple things like rolling over minutes not used to a later time or not counting minutes used to review execution results," that would be a start, Fellows says. "They just want some tweaks to what they are able to do now."

Though no vendor has publicly stated its intentions to alter its pricing model for grid computing (at least not in its purest form), a few vendors have taken what Fellows terms "baby steps". All it could take to liberate huge market share from competitors, says Fellows, would be for one powerful software vendor to simply change its model.

Certain applications that have been developed in-house have no licensing costs, such as analytic, financial calculation and electronic design automation. Those have been on early adopter companies' grids for years. But outside large corporations, analysts say there's a lack of in-house grid talent to make those in-house solutions work.

The Grid Horizon Keeps Moving

There are no explicit technical barriers to putting an application on a grid, according to Fellows. "If you really want to, you can grid-enable anything," he says. But if there is a legitimate argument to be made against a wholesale shift to grid, it is that converting existing applications requires lots of hard work, money and experienced grid developers (who are in short supply today). Unless an application consumes a lot of processing power, CIOs might not see a big payback, and vendors might be left holding the bag for an expensive rewrite. The financial uncertainty surrounding software conversion costs and licensing models means that early adopters will probably pay a premium for grid-enabled applications, according to The 451 Group report, further slowing grid adoption.

So few applications have been rewritten for grid today (mostly analytical software) that CIOs are left with stark choices: Bug your software vendor; convert an existing application to grid yourself, as McKay did; or build a grid application from scratch.

Here's why converting an application to grid takes a lot of work: The essence of grid computing is the availability of computing resources from all kinds of PCs and servers inside and outside your four walls. One attribute of early grid computing applications is that one task doesn't depend on the outcome of another task. (In big, number-crunching grid applications, for example, calculations are parsed into small, independent slices and can be added together at any time.) But many enterprise applications have dependencies - one calculation or process can't move forward until another finishes. Developers have to figure out how to divide application processing into pieces (called threads of execution) to allow those applications to be run in parallel, according to Gartner's Claunch. Unless the code can divide its operations across dozens, hundreds, thousands or more threads, says Claunch, it will not be able to scale its performance when given the many computing resources that grid offers. Parsing the application takes work and requires a lot more than simply tweaking existing applications; it may even require a complete rewrite.

For all those reasons, CIOs haven't yet implemented traditional enterprise applications - including ERP and CRM - on grid, because in these, each task typically depends on the outcome of others, which is not something grids are good at yet, though any application can theoretically be grid-enabled. Forcing those applications, as written, onto a grid would be similar to strapping an Atlas rocket to a Volkswagen. "Your car would melt," says Illuminata's Eunice. The core algorithms inside many of these transactional applications would also need to change.

Observers aren't optimistic about the economic incentives for vendors to rebuild their wares for grid computing. "Grid will proceed at the pace with which the software changes," says Forrester Research principal analyst Frank Gillett.

"Glaciers move faster."