Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
data might be processed on computers spread over several continents and coun-
tries the privacy rules valid in his country are applied.
Overall many new governance rules need to be established and their execution needs
to be monitored in an efficient way. This is difficult to achieve by manual moni-
toring. Thus, the availability of support for coding policies in monitoring tools and
automatic execution of the governance policies is an important aspect. Potential
software modules providing this functionality are described in chapter 8. Without
automatic monitoring, the gain in computing speed will result in a loss of time
for management and governance tasks. Thus, support for monitoring of internal
resources needs to be extended with support for monitoring of external resources.
All this implies additional costs and investments that need to be compared to the
potential gains of Grid computing.
To summarize, the introduction of HPC based on external resources in form
of utility computing or deployed on internal Grids results in advantages but also
additional costs and requires considerable organizational and governance changes
for the organization. The potential gains of Grid computing can be summarized as
follows:
• Significant acceleration of tasks that require high performance computing and
based on that time-to-solution.
• Increased flexibility and scalability of available resources based on the possi-
bility to add external resources in an ad hoc manner according to demand. This
also results in higher agility and flexibility of related business processes.
• Lower IT infrastructure and maintenance costs as part of the demand is covered
by external resources that are consumed on a pay-per-use basis.
• Conversion of fixed investment costs into variable costs that occur only if
external infrastructure is actually used.
The potential gains may be partially offset by some potential costs:
• Investment in Grid enablement of own applications or switch to pay-per-use
licenses. This might include also costs for Grid middleware, which is used for
enhancing the application.
• Connection and communication costs to the utility computing and SaaS provider.
• Investment in new monitoring tools and capabilities of employees to be able
to manage a heterogeneous IT environment consisting of external and internal
resources.
• Costs related to change of processes.
• Costs related to meeting higher requirements related to security and privacy
aspects.
In each case a careful Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculation needs to be
performed in order to disclose if the gains from evolving to utility computing and
SaaS in financial terms are higher than incurring costs related to it. For example, the
case of the BE BEinEIMRT clearly shows the advantage of external resources for
hospitals. On the contrary, in his attempt to quantify the gains of Grid computing,
