Sun will lead the way with the release of ready-made grid computing systems next month as suppliers queue to show that they are not leaving the technology to IBM and Oracle.
Although still in their infancy, grid systems promise to be able to harness spare computing resources from networks, providing huge amounts of power for complex analytical programs.
At the SunNetwork conference in San Francisco, which begins on 16 September, the Unix giant is expected to announce release dates for the Sun Fire V60x and Sun Fire V210 Compute Grid Rack Systems, which have Sun Control Station and Sun One Grid Engine software installed on a management node. Sun will back up the products with services and the Customer Ready Systems Programme where software is pre-loaded to the customer's specification.
The Sun push comes as the grid concept is receiving more attention. Oracle will next month put grid capabilities at the forefront of upgrades to its core database and application server products.
IBM, the first to push the model as a major advance in networking, recently announced it was embedding grid support into its WebSphere enterprise software.
Business intelligence giant SAS is also entering the fray. It recently joined the Global Grid Forum, an industry group that promotes grid standards. SAS said that by using grids, customers such as the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina have cut the length of research projects that require statistical analysis computation by more than 90 percent.
But security, metering and licensing issues are likely to delay the widespread deployment of grids.
"Firms such as HP, IBM and Sun have probably not done a good job in educating the market," said Diana Billingham, vice president of technology services at IT services firm Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. "There's going to have to be a big change in mindsets. Most clients talk about it conceptually. It's on their radars but it's not coming for two or three years."
A small number of UK companies are already using grids, Billingham noted. Oil giant Shell, for example, is using grid computing for seismic analysis of rock formations in oil exploration.
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