BT jumping into the virtualisation pool

By Alun Williams

Posted on 2 Mar 2006 at 10:46

In terms of illustrating access to the pool of virtualised resources, he accepted that the 'BT domain' would co-exist and overlap with the 'customer domain' and 'partner domains'. In other words, BT is obviously not going to control all the resources and provide all the services, but the intent is clear - virtual private grids offer a way for BT to evolve from being just a network provider. To take a possible real world example, entertainment services - whether music or video downloads - are clearly going to drive demand for broadband, and BT will want to become more involved in the services provided rather than just relay them.

A big problem for virtualising services, yet to be fully addressed, is the question of licensing. How can you adequately charge for software on ad-hoc basis, when per-cpu licensing is no longer valid. Long term, Falcon pointed out, licensing should not be an issue when you fully devolve a task to the 'pool'. Essentially, you pay for the service, and the service provider has to account internally for any incurred costs - BT for example, would have to take care of any licensing issues with Microsoft, Oracle, or any-other third-party.

Frank Falcon was talking at the Grid Computing Now! seminar in London. This focused on the marriage of grid computing, as the underlying technological infrastructure, with service oriented architectures (SOA), providing the overlaying, adaptive application infrastructure.

As well as a discussion of Standard Life's adoption of an IBM-based approach, and the financial services provider Cattles' Oracle-based implementation of a services oriented architecture, the 451 Group presented the latest stats on the market adoption of grid computing, based on specific vendor deployments (IBM, Sun, HP, Oracle etc, etc). Reporting that 75 per cent of major investment banks are already using grid computing in some capacity (however varying in degree), they detected a clear lead in interest among Financial institutions (31 per cent), followed by the Life Sciences sector, then Manufacturing (18 per cent) and even Government institutions (10 per cent).

The Grid Computing Now! event was hosted by IECnet. This is a not-for-profit collaboration between the National e-Science Centre, which works out of Edinburgh University, and Intellect, which is the trade association for the IT, telecommunications and electronics industries in the UK.

With £1 million of DTI funding, the IECnet was set up in August 2005 to promote the growth of grid-computing - DTI boosts bid for UK grid computing.