Four Ways to Recession Proof Your Business with Grid

By Rich Wellner

Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton all recognized that the economy was the part of american life that everyone needed and noticed acutely. They appointed Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan to run the fed, decisions critical to 25 years of a largely stable and growing economy.

Now we have Alan Greenspan saying that the current administrations failure to curb spending was "a major mistake", that Republican congressmen were "at a feeding trough" and that they "swapped principle for power [and] deserved to lose [the 2006 congressional election]". We also have current fed chairman Ben Bernanke appearing in Congress asking for an "economic stimulus" package.

I'm not economics professor, but I got out of the market when Greenspan started stumping on "irrational exuberance" and he has my attention on the current economy again. Since I work in services, that got me thinking about how to help my customers work to mitigate their risks going into turbulence that's looking like it might be enough to force some unscheduled stops.

Here are 4 things you can start doing today to prepare your business to ride out any storm that may hit this year.

1) Diversify. Right now most clusters are running as islands. There is a lot of chatter in the news lately about cloud computing. To a first approximation, cloud computing is the idea that users should be able to toss a request into the cloud and get results back. While cloud computing is a new term, the grid community has been doing cloud computing for years. From nearly the beginning of the movement, the security models necessary to do cloud computing have been fundamental parts of Globus Toolkit. Metaschedulers such as Gridway provide the next bit. A user submits their request to Gridway (their interface to the computing cloud) and gets their results back. The practical fallout in recessionary times is that you can expand your customer base by providing a single front end to all the resources in your data centers. This 'cloud' allows you to diversify your resource usage and greatly reduce the risk that some of your clusters will fall into disuse (i.e. disuse == loss of money!) as projects are cancelled, delayed or otherwise unable to meet their projections.

2) Offer Killer Customer Service. Customer service is about controlling the things you can. It's about training your staff to be great and making the experience of dealing with your services something that they look forward to. I'm making a last moment trip on Thursday to a customer site and realized yesterday how much I appreciate my travel agent, Sandie, over at Bursch Travel. She manages all those points programs that get my miles and hotel stays registered and remembers not to cram me into a window seat on an RJ. She's also a pleasure to talk with, even while she suffers through another ridiculously cold winter on the northern plains. She's one of the people I would fight for during a budget war.

You need to be that person for your customers also. There is too often conflict between internal support organizations and user communities. With open source tools you have integration opportunities that don't exist with other tools. As an example, we recently did a prototype project that allowed users to monitor their jobs via their Blackberry. We can perform application specific integrations and present a computational chemist with a custom dashboard (on their mobile or at their desktop) telling them the state of their Turbomole jobs. Now they can know how much progress their job has made using the metrics appropriate for that application, rather than simply whether the job is running somewhere and for how long.

3) Intensify Marketing. What if you threw a cloud and nobody came?

People don't like to admit it, but success in internal groups is measured that same as success for external users, making users aware of capabilities and getting them to use them. You've built your clusters. You've combined them into a grid or cloud. Now you have to get people to take advantage of those resources. Go to the user meetings. Understand their problems. Let them know you and your staff came help. Let them know that the reason you exist is to make them look great.

4) Seek Improvement. You've made a grid investment. One of the by-products of this is an immense amount of data about how your system is being used. Take the initiative to analyze this information before people even recognize what's there to be mined. Show your users the bottlenecks. Show them your failings. Understand what this means to their business. Then, work with them to build solutions. Be their hero!