In today's Grid Today blog, All Things Distributed, Derrick Harris talks about another legacy-grid player that is re-positioning it's market approach to include application virtualization. What I find interesting is how the CMO from the company describes their reason for re-positioning based on the fact that it's "all about the application".

Well, welcome to the party Kelly! We (Appistry) have been saying "it's all about the application" since our inception in 2001. And you're right, grid computing often connotes a process that is invasive to the application layer, but I often use the term grid as a scalability starting point (even though the fabric provides scale-out application virtualization via our software based load balancing) to build upon as I describe the reliability that the fabric provides applications over and above legacy-grid scalability. Then I layer on how the fabric can run on off-the-shelf commodity hardware, how the fabric is self-organizing and how it auto-provisions applications across all of it's Workers. And did I mention the fact that the fabric has the ability to run applications un-modified for coarse-grained reliability, or you can annotate your .NET assemblies entry points (methods), properties, arguments and return values for fine grained reliability?

Net, net you're right it's all about the application! But isn't it great that you have a choice that can lower your operational costs and hardware acquisition costs along the way...

Until next time...

Mark

Technorati : application fabric, application virtualization, legacy grid