Here's an example of how the technology will work. A financial company's IT infrastructure is configured for online trading and built for peak capacity periods. As a result, the infrastructure is well under-utilized about 90 percent of the time. Now, the company wants take advantage of this excess systems capacity to run other applications -- such as stock trading, portfolio analysis, and wealth management -- without degrading existing online trading applications.

IBM Server Allocation for WebSphere Application Server allows the company to deploy the new applications within the existing infrastructure by making all servers available as a single pool of resources and by providing management tools to ensure server capacity is automatically allocated to meet pre-defined application service levels. The technology also provides new parallel processing capabilities to help certain types of applications take advantage of the total available resources to improve performance.

WebSphere, grid computing, and China
Since this month's special focus is WebSphere in China, it's time to look at how China will be using the technology with WebSphere.

According to our sources at IBM, China's Ministry of Education has started using grid computing technology to hook up universities across that vast country, making it possible for vast networks of computers to work together on research, scientific, and education projects. IBM tells us that this is one of the world's largest grid computing implementations, linking more than 200,000 students and faculty across more than 100 universities.

This thing is massive. When the China Education and Research Grid completes its first phase in 2004, the grid will crank away at more than six teraflops (that's trillions of calculations per second). Thinking even bigger, China's Ministry of Education says the grid will eventually run at more than fifteen teraflops.

Going all buzzwordy for a moment, the Chinese grid uses WebSphere extensions that work within the as-yet not fully standard Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) standard. There's some big iron backing this project up, including:

• 49 IBM eServer xSeries running Linux,
• 6 pSeries servers running AIX, and
• IBM TotalStorage FAStT200 servers for data store.

The plan is for the various participating universities to connect to a common virtual hub that will, at least in theory, automatically find the appropriate computation resources -- including projects from biology, and even video and e-learning courses.

Another part of the plan is what is essential expertise distribution. The idea is that schools can focus on the areas they're expert in, and rely on the other schools for different expertise.

"Grid computing, and the concept of virtualization at its core, is a key element in building an on demand business," says Dr. George Wang, director of IBM China Software Development Laboratory and IBM China Research and Development Laboratory for IBM Greater China Group. "WebSphere software helps a Grid gather untapped computing capabilities and functionalities and make it available to users across the Grid as needed. IBM leads Grid computing in China and around the world to help customers realize substantial business benefit by sharing and optimizing their existing IT infrastructure using IBM Grid computing technologies."

Other projects
China apparently is jumping into grid technology in a big way. Back in July 2003, Shanghai's city government built a grid that manages information resources spread across the city's municipal government and handle city-wide emergency and medical services management systems.

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and can be reached via email at david@zatz.com.