HP Goes Grid Across the Board

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Hewlett-Packard Thursday revealed plans to bring open grid standards to all of its consumer and commercial product lines, further enabling core enterprise infrastructure technologies for grid computing.

The initiative, part of HP’s Adaptive Enterprise strategy, will integrate industry grid standards, including the Globus Toolkit v3.0 and Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), across HP’s entire product line, from iPAQ devices to HP-UX servers, Nick van der Zweep, director of utility computing at HP’s Enterprise Storage and Systems group, told ServerWatch.

“Over the next few years, this means everything from HP’s smallest handhelds, printers and PCs to our most powerful storage arrays and supercomputers will all be able to connect with and serve as resources on the grid,” said Shane Robison, HP’s chief strategy and technology officer.

HP also announced enterprise consulting within HP Services for grid-based
platforms at this time. HP Services will offer management, deployment, and life cycle
support of grid architectures.

Under HP’s vision of grid computing, an enterprise can draw from IT resources worldwide to meet its dynamic needs for computing resources.

“Grid is an important piece of the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy, where today, we see the shared computing vision soon turning into reality as commercial enterprises more
aggressively seek the agility and cost benefits the grid affords,” said Robison.

Van der Zweep told ServerWatch that grid computing is now “pushing Web services to new extremes.” Grid views everything as a service and supplies the interconnect. As a result, grid standards, such as those from OGSA, are enabling Web services and grid services to converge.

HP customers and partners in grid computing include the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the Gelato Federation, CERN, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network, Avaki, and Platform Computing.

Van der Zweep said HP’s latest strategy will move grid computing beyond the research and technology areas into the enterprise world, particularly the healthcare and financial services markets.

HP cites analysts’s estimates that grid software and services will be a $4 billion
market by 2008, and anticipates the opportunity to be significantly larger
as enterprise IS departments embrace the concept of grid.

Enterprises interested in moving legacy systems to grid can do so by downloading Globus Toolkit 3.0.