The Grid and Hosting

By Rich Wellner

Jeremy Sherwood from opus:interactive has a good write up of HostingCon 2007.

My experience with Grid Computing goes back to the late 1990s with distributed.net in helping making encryption that much secure. With the technology originally designed to harness unused CPU cycles to solve complex problems, to now being used to hosting an infinite number of hosting environments. It is amazing the level of reliability and scalability options that are available with the system. The ability to grow in resources at an unlimited rate -on the fly- with little to no exposure to change, is outstanding. The other great aspect of this system of technology is the ability to contribute to a sustainable mindset. If done properly, you can reuse old servers and hardware that in a normal life cycle would be recycled, now can be reprovisioned back into a production environment with little concern of impact of hardware failure. This rejuvenation of hardware opens up a great opportunity to get that-much-more out of your initial investment as well as being able to pass those saving onto the customer.