Nearly 25 percent of the survey respondents reported either a grid actively in place or currently planned for installation. Of those sites, nearly three-quarters reported the key benefits that grid delivers as being application fail-over, availability and scalability. The most prevalent grid-based applications are data warehousing and business intelligence. Overall, grid computing is growing in scope with many of the grid users reporting that they plan to deploy across more than twelve nodes next year, however, more than half of the respondents report lingering concerns about the additional complexity involved with further deployment of grid computing.
Clustering through Oracle RAC was reported by 35 percent of the survey respondents overall with 35 percent also reporting a third-party cluster installed. While clustering is seen mainly as a failover enabler, the survey found that users viewed it as a way of enhancing application availability. However, as with grid, users found that expanding clusters from two-to-four nodes offered challenges in complexity and staff training.
The study found that both clustering and grid were growing for many of the same business reasons, but that the flexibility of grid foreshadows an accelerated growth track in the coming year. The study also offered interesting documentation on the adoption of clustering by industry grouping with 53 percent of the healthcare respondents reporting RAC installed and 13 percent reporting grid installed. Conversely, no retail respondents reported grid installed, yet 50 percent have deployed in-production clusters.
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