A grid style computing model

A grid infrastructure may not be the case for certain organizations. The reasons for this may be one of enterprise size, IT policy, outsourcing model, lack of budget, or ISV certification. In these circumstances it is generally recognised as good practice for applications with non-intensive workloads to use server virtualisation in order to consolidate.

However, where maximising consolidation, availability and agility are of paramount importance, a combination of server virtualisation and grid-based solutions are the best way to maximise the benefits of consolidation, availability and agility. Working in tandem, they can ensure enhanced server virtualisation, the ability to dynamically scale within and across nodes, and the dynamic resizing of virtual nodes.

Compared to other models of computing, IT systems designed and implemented in the grid style deliver a higher quality of service, at a lower cost, with greater flexibility. Higher quality of service results from having no single point of failure, a powerful security infrastructure, and centralised, policy-driven management.

Lower costs, meanwhile, derive from increasing the utilisation of resources and dramatically reducing management and maintenance costs. Rather than dedicating a stack of software and hardware to a specific task, all resources are pooled and allocated on demand, which eliminates underutilised capacity and redundant capabilities. Grid computing also enables the use of smaller individual hardware components, which reduces the cost of each individual component and provides more flexibility to devote resources in accordance with changing needs.

Forward-thinking enterprises are implementing grid computing to take advantage of database consolidation, running multiple, disparate workloads on the shared resources of the grid. The result is a more available, scalable, flexible and cost effective infrastructure resulting in better service levels to customers, users and partners. Latest grid-based solutions are now available that also offer all the benefits of server virtualisation to single-instance databases on a physical hardware infrastructure.

Many databases can be consolidated into a single cluster with minimal overhead while providing the high availability benefits of failover protection, online rolling patch application, as well as rolling upgrades for the operating system.

With these next-generation grid-based solutions, there are no limits to server scalability and if applications grow to require more resources than a single node can supply, they can be easily upgraded online. If the node becomes overloaded, users can migrate the instance to another node in the cluster using an online migration utility with no downtime for application users.