Oracle gropes for grid market in India

After the intensive clamor about ‘on demand’ computing generated from the IBM ad campaign, competitors it appears are ready to join the band wagon. Recently, Veritas had put out its ‘comprehensive solution’ for utility computing in the Indian market. Now, Oracle is giving a new push to its 10g Grid, for grid computing on the Oracle 10g database and framework with revised pricing and availability to the Indian client.

The trends of grid computing are similar to what happened in storage a while ago. It works on the assumption that people are on the lookout for consolidated load balancing. But real question is are they? And if yes, is the Indian industry ready for it? Oracle seems to say yes. "We expect customers to be skeptical, and it's good. The challenge is to show the incremental savings to our customers," says Charles E. Phillips, Jr., President Oracle Corporation. Further he claims that some early adopters here include just two server structures.

Apparently the 10g outdoes the 9i in that is has a specially designed algorithm, within a dedicated 'listener' which prioritizes queries into master and slave requests. This grid architecture seemingly also uses virtualization thus reducing granular transparency between management and technology.

An obvious concern with grid computing is that how will complex applications such as ERP get broken down? Answering that Brajesh Goyal, Principal Product Manager, Grid Computing, Oracle Corporation says, "we have grid-enabled our database platform so as to grid-enable anything that runs on top of it automatically.

The push all the vendors are giving grid computing seems to suggest the Indian industry is ready for it. Whether it really is only time will tell.

— Deepali Gupta