Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 5.1:
Popular business cases in the market today, their enablers and involved actor
Most popular Grid Business Cases
in the market
The Grid benefit (value-
proposition or added-value)
Main actors involved
1. Company utilises an internal
Grid solution as a virtualisation
technique to improve the utilisa-
tion of resources (also known as the
“Enterprise Grid”)
For the company: Performance
differentiation and collaboration
benefit in case of inter depart-
ments (VO-like) virtualisation of
resources.
The company
Grid s/w and application
providers
Systems integrator (can be
the same with the Grid s/w
provider)
2. Company rents external
computing resources through the
internet with Grid being the under-
lying infrastructure on the provider's
side
For the company: Performance
differentiation
The company
Resources provider
(e.g. Amazon & Sun)
- See case No. 5
3. Company Grid-enables existing
application or develops an applica-
tion optimised to run over the Grid
(BEinGRID BEs cases) and offers it
to external clients
For the company: performance
differentiation, new markets through
SaaS provisioning
The service or application
provider (the company)
The user that either buys or
rents the solution
The Grid software provider
Systems integrator (can be
the same with the Grid s/w
provider)
For the user: new services not fore-
seen or affordable before
4. A group of organisations forming
a VO in order to gain benefit from
common use of resources (CERN
is an example of this). Case also
known as “Partner or Collaborative
Grids”
- Collaboration benefit
- New services from the VO part-
ners to internal or external users,
not possible before.
The users (VO participants)
Grid s/w and application
providers
Systems integrator (can be
the same with the Grid s/w
provider)
Resources provider - if
external computing resources
are utilised
(e.g. Amazon & Sun)
5. Company acts as a computing
resources provider e.g. the
“Amazon”, “Sun”, “IBM” etc cases
For the user: Resources provided on
demand. Performance differentia-
tion - See Case No.2
The resource provider (the
company)
The users that buy resources
on demand - See Case No.2
For the company: revenue genera-
tion and reduced costs of offering
such a service through virtualisation
6. Company provides Cloud
Computing Services with Grid as
the underlying infrastructure (most
popular emerging scenario). E.g.
the “Amazon”, “Google”, “IBM”,
“Microsoft” etc cases
For the user: Provision of Cloud
computing services (IT-as-a-
Service)
The Cloud Computing
provider
The users that purchase
Cloud Computing services
For the company: high utilisation of
resources through virtualisation
