Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for

Grid Computing
An Oracle White Paper
September 2003
 Oracle 10g: Infrastructure
for Grid Computing

EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW

What is all the hype about grid computing?

Today, islands of computing within organizations make inefficient use of
resources. Systems are slow to change and expensive to maintain.
Grid computing addresses these problems by providing an adaptive software
infrastructure that makes efficient use of low-cost servers and modular storage,
which balances workloads more effectively and provides capacity on demand.
By scaling out with small servers in small increments, you get performance and
reliability at low-cost. New unified management allows you to manage
everything cheaply and simply in the grid.
What is new about grid computing?
Grid computing removes the fixed connections between applications, servers,
databases, machines, storage every component of the grid. By treating
everything in the grid as a virtualized service, intelligent systems can optimize
resource utilization and responsiveness.
Grid computing is based on five fundamental attributes: virtualization, dynamic
provisioning, resource pooling, self-adaptive systems, and unified management.
What is Oracle doing with grid computing?
Oracle 10g allows companies to begin evolving their IT toward a grid
computing model. For storage, databases, application servers, and applications,
Oracles new technology meets the requirements of grid computing. Together,
Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Application Server 10g, and Oracle Enterprise
Manager 10g provide the first complete grid infrastructure software.
This paper introduces and defines grid computing for businesses and describes
how Oracle 10g products implement a grid infrastructure.

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 1

INTRODUCTION

Enterprise IT is under continuous pressure to do more with less. Change is

constant, and companies need to adapt quickly to stay competitive. Meanwhile,
requirements for availability and performance increase, while budgets tighten.
To deal with the unpredictability and immediacy of computing needs,
companies typically size servers for peak loads and staff IT organizations to
handle ad hoc requests.
A new model of computing is emerging to address these problems. The vision
of the grid computing model is shared throughout the industry, although some
industry leaders have coined new terms for it, for example: Computing on
Demand, Adaptive Computing, N1, Utility Computing, Hosted Computing,
Organic Computing, and Ubiquitous Computing. In recognition of the
significant new capabilities required to power grid computing, Oracle has
named its new technology products Oracle 10g. This is the first major name
change since Oracle added internet capabilities to Oracle8i.

Vision of Grid Computing

The central idea of grid computing is that computing should be as reliable,
pervasive, and transparent as a utility. It shouldnt matter where your data or
application resides, or what computer processes your request. You should be
able to request information or computation and have it delivered as much as
you want, whenever you want. This is analogous to the way electric utilities
work in that you dont know where the generator is or how the electric grid is
wired. You just ask for electricity and you get it. The goal is to make computing
a utility a ubiquitous commodity. Hence, it has the name, grid.

Origins of Grid Computing

Grid computing was conceived in the academic and research communities.
Much like internet computing, which grew from the communication needs of
dispersed scientific researchers, grid computing originated from the needs of
the scientific communitys needs to:
Create a dynamic computing environment for sharing resources and results
Scale to accommodate petabytes of data, and teraflops of computing power
And keep costs down

Scientific Grids
SETI@home, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is one of the earliest
examples of a scientific grid. Signals from telescopes, radio receivers, and other
sources monitoring deep space are distributed to the PCs of individual science
buffs via the internet. This loose network of small computers crunches
numbers, looking for patterns that could suggest signs of intelligent life.

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Although the idea of harnessing idle computers across the internet is
intellectually interesting, businesses will never want their data or their
computing distributed to random computers. But, just as businesses have
brought the concepts of the public internet in-house to make intranets,
enterprises can bring the concepts of the scientific grids in-house to make
enterprise grids. With both public grids and enterprise grids, grid computing is
about harnessing the work of many of small computers.

Benefits of Enterprise Grid Computing

The need for low-cost computing drove the SETI@home innovation. The
primary benefit of grid computing to businesses is achieving high quality of
service and flexibility at lower cost. Enterprise grid computing lowers costs by:
Increasing hardware utilization and resource sharing
Enabling companies to scale out incrementally with low-cost components
Reducing management and administration requirements

WHAT IS ENTERPRISE GRID COMPUTING?

Enterprise grid computing builds a critical software infrastructure that can run
on large numbers of small, networked computers, by combining two related
concepts:
Implement One from Many. Grid computing coordinates the use of clusters
of machines to create a single logical entity, such as a database or an
application server. By distributing work across many servers, grid
computing exhibits benefits of availability, scalability, and performance
using low-cost components. Because a single logical entity is implemented
across many machines, companies can add or remove capacity in small
increments, online. With the capability to add capacity on demand to a
particular function, companies get more flexibility for adapting to peak
loads, thus achieving better hardware utilization and better business
responsiveness.
Manage Many as One. Grid computing allows you to manage and
administer groups of machines, groups of database instances, and groups
of application servers at low-cost. Grid computing first removes many of
the administrative costs of managing a single system by making each
database and each application server adaptive to changing circumstances.
Then, the model makes managing many systems simple, by allowing them
to be managed as a single logical entity.

New Trends in Hardware

Much of what makes grid computing possible today are the innovations in
hardware. For example,

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 3

 Processors. New low-cost, high volume Intel Itanium 2, Sun SPARC,
and IBM PowerPC 64-bit processors now deliver performance equal to
or better than exotic processors used in high-end SMP servers.
Blade servers. Blade server technology reduces the cost of hardware
and increases the density of servers, which further reduces expensive
data center real estate requirements.
Networked storage. Disk storage costs continue to plummet even
faster than processor costs. Network storage technologies such as
Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SANs)
further reduce these costs by enabling sharing of storage across
systems.
Network interconnects. Gigabit Ethernet and Infiniband interconnect
technologies are driving down the cost of connecting servers into
clusters.

Power Comes from Software

Although the newness of grid computing comes primarily from hardware, the
power of the grid infrastructure must be embodied in software. The capability
of a database, for example, to store and retrieve data through an abstract
interface without knowing much about the underlying location or structure of
that data requires software intelligence. The capability of an application server
to begin distributing work to newly added blade servers without going offline
can only be accomplished with software. By providing software to leverage and
control new grid hardware, Oracle supplies the grid infrastructure, and powers
enterprise grids.

Grid Computing Aligns with Oracles Strengths

The ultimate vision of grid computing is a new way to build data centers and a
new way to think about IT. The foundations of grid computing, however, have
been in the making for many years, and every one of Oracles strengths and
focus areas aligns with and contributes to grid computing:
Focus on Consolidation. For years Oracle has recommended that
companies consolidate geographically dispersed data centers,
consolidate all company data into single databases, and consolidate all
applications onto application servers. With the advent of grid
computing, consolidation means using pools of relatively small
machines to run consolidated databases and application servers.
Support for Standards. The technology industry can be divided into
two camps: those that promote a proprietary single-vendor platform,
and those that support open standards for interoperability. Although
Oracle provides a complete, integrated infrastructure platform and

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 4

 extols the benefits of software suites, it has been a fervent supporter of
open standards. Open standards must solidify for grid computing to
reach its full potential, and Oracle continues to work toward this goal.
Expertise on Linux. Oracle has both the leading application server and
the leading database on Linux. Oracle brings its strengths in security,
reliability, and performance to Linux to make it strong enough for
enterprise deployments. Because Linux runs very well on small
computers (one to four CPUs) and provides the best price for
performance, Linux is the perfect operating system for the large
number of small computers that constitute the hardware in an ideal grid
environment.

GRID COMPUTING ATTRIBUTES

The requirements for grid computing infrastructure can be described by the
following attributes:
Virtualization at every layer of the computing stack
Provisioning of work and resources based on policies and dynamic
requirements
Pooling of resources to increase utilization
Self-adaptive software that largely tunes and fixes itself
Unified management and provisioning

Virtualization at Every Layer

Virtualization is the abstraction into a service of every physical and logical entity
in a grid. Virtualization is important because it enables grid components (such as
storage, processors, databases, application servers, and applications) to
integrate tightly without creating rigidity and brittleness in the system. Rather
than making fixed ties that determine which application server node will handle
requests from a particular application, for example, or where a database
physically locates its data, virtualization enables each component of the grid to
react to changing circumstances more quickly and to adapt to component
failures without compromising performance of the system as a whole.

Dynamic Provisioning
Provisioning simply means distributing supplies where they are needed. In the
context of the grid, supplies may mean server requests that need to be
handled, data that needs to be accessed and used, or computations that need to
be performed. Provisioning in the grid environment means a grid service broker
that knows the resource requirements of one element of the grid and the
resource availability of another element links the two together automatically and
dynamically to make efficient use of resources. Then it adjusts the associations

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 5

as circumstances change. Policies, such as response time thresholds or
anticipated peak demands, can be used to further optimize the associations of
resource-requestors to resource providers.

Resource Pooling
Consolidation and pooling of resources is required for grids to achieve better
utilization of resources, a key contributor to lower costs. By pooling individual
disks into storage arrays and individual servers into blade farms, the grid
runtime processes that dynamically couple service consumers to service
providers have more flexibility to optimize the associations. Resource sharing
also happens purely in software. Web services provide the model for
applications to expose re-usable functionality for discovery and invocation by
unrelated applications.

Self-Adaptive Software
With labor being the most significant portion of IT costs, savings due to better
hardware utilization or more responsive systems become irrelevant if the
everyday tasks of administrators are not automated and simplified. A grid
infrastructure would be unworkable if every node required constant manual
tuning and intervention. A critical grid infrastructure requirement is systems that
automate the bulk of maintenance and tuning tasks traditionally performed by IT
staff. More of the tasks that used to be performed by administrators must now
be handled by the systems themselves.

Unified Management
Even with self-managing systems, human beings will always be involved in
managing an enterprise grid, but the management tasks required by humans
should be simplified with a single tool that can provision, monitor, and
administer every element in the grid. Such a tool should evaluate availability and
performance from the perspective of the user, such that any bottleneck in the
system or any unavailable component raises alerts. Most importantly, with a
grid infrastructure, IT professionals must be able to treat groups of systems as
a single logical entity so that tasks can be performed once and executed on
multiple machines.
Implement One from Many. Together, the attributes of virtualization,
dynamic provisioning, and resource pooling form the requirements for
software that implements a single logical entity using many services running
on multiple servers and crossing multiple disksan entity which delivers
high quality of service from low-cost components.
Manage Many as One. Together, the attributes of self-adaptive software
and a unified management model form the requirements for dramatically

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 6

 lowering management costs by viewing the entire enterprise grid as one
simple whole.

ORACLE 10g: GRID INFRASTRUCTURE

Oracle 10g provides the first complete, integrated software infrastructure to
power grid computing. Oracle 10g takes the fundamental attributes of grid
computing
Implement One from Many Manage Many as One
Virtualization at every layer Self-adaptive software
Dynamic provisioning Unified management
Resource pooling
and implements them throughout every element of the grid: storage,
databases, application servers, and applications.
The diagram below visually depicts the way Oracle 10g products and features
map to grid computing requirements.

The following sections describe how grid computing attributes are embodied in
Oracles three grid infrastructure products:
Oracle Database 10g
Oracle Application Server 10g
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 7

Oracle Database 10g
Oracle Database 10g builds on the success of Oracle9i Database, and adds
many new grid-specific capabilities. Other vendors implement certain portions
of a grid infrastructure, for example pools of virtualized storage are becoming
common, but no one else can provide a true grid database. Oracle Database 10g
is based on Real Application Clusters, introduced in Oracle9i. There are more
than 500 production customers running Oracles clustering technology, helping
to prove the validity of Oracles grid infrastructure.

Real Application Clusters

Oracle Real Application Clusters enables a single database to run across multiple
clustered nodes in a grid, pooling the processing resources of several standard
machines. Oracle is uniquely flexible in its ability to provision workload across
machines because it is the only database technology that does not require data
to be partitioned and distributed along with the work.
In Oracle 10g, the database can immediately begin balancing workload across a
new node with new processing capacity as it gets re-provisioned from one
database to another, and can relinquish a machine when it is no longer needed
this is capacity on demand. Other databases cannot grow and shrink while
running and, therefore, cannot utilize hardware as efficiently.
New integrated clusterware in Oracle 10g makes clustering easy by eliminating
the need to purchase, install, configure, and support third-party clusterware.
Servers can be easily added and dropped to an Oracle cluster with no
downtime. Oracle has the only database technology to include clusterware for
all operating systems, which dramatically reduces the opportunities for failure in
a clustered environment.

Automatic Storage Management

Automatic Storage Management simplifies storage management for Oracle

Databases. By abstracting the details of storage management, Oracle improves
data access performance through sophisticated data provisioning, without
requiring additional work from DBAs. Instead of managing many database files,
Oracle DBAs manage only a small number of disk groups. A disk group is a set
of disk devices that Oracle manages as a single, logical unit. An administrator
can define a particular disk group as the default disk group for a database, and
Oracle automatically allocates storage for and creates or deletes the files
associated with the database object.
Automatic Storage Management also offers the benefits of storage technologies
such as RAID or Logical Volume Managers (LVMs). Oracle can balance I/O
from multiple databases across all of the devices in a disk group, and it
implements striping and mirroring to improve I/O performance and data
reliability. In addition, Oracle can reassign disks from node to node and cluster

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 8

to cluster, automatically reconfiguring the group. Because Automatic Storage
Management is written to work exclusively with Oracle, it achieves better
performance than generalized storage virtualization solutions.

Information Provisioning

In addition to the provisioning of work across multiple nodes and the

provisioning of data across multiple disks, another type of provisioning happens
within Oracle Database 10g the provisioning of information itself. Depending
on the volume of information and the frequency of access, it may be necessary
to move data from where it currently resides or to share data across multiple
databases. Oracle 10g includes various facilities to provide access to
information when and where its needed, matching information providers and
information requestors. The most fine-grained and real-time of these facilities is
Oracle Streams, which can migrate data from one database to another while
both are online. Bulk data transfers are more suitable in some circumstances,
for which Oracle provides Data Pump and Transportable Tablespaces. In
Oracle 10g, all information provisioning facilities can move data to databases
running on different operating systems, which is particularly useful for
migrating databases to a grid environment, for example, blade servers running
Linux.

Self-Managing Database

The first step toward manageability in a grid environment is making each

individual system require less human attention. Oracle 10g, with the new self-
managing database, reduces the maintenance and tuning tasks required by
administrators. Oracle Database 10g includes an intelligent database
infrastructure that takes snapshots of vital statistics and workload data to be
analyzed for self-tuning and for advising administrators. The self-managing
database automatically diagnoses problems such as poor connection
management, lock contention, and poorly performing SQL. Oracle Database
10g fixes certain diagnosed problems and advises DBAs about simple corrective
measure in other cases. Oracles self-managing database enables DBAs to
concentrate on more value-added work and dramatically reduces administration
costs of databases.

Oracle Application Server 10g

Oracle Application Server 10g provides a complete infrastructure platform for
developing and deploying enterprise applications, integrating many functions
including a J2EE and Web services runtime environment, an enterprise portal,
an enterprise integration broker, business intelligence, web caching, and identity
management services.

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 9

Oracle Application Server 10g adds new grid computing features, building on
the success of Oracle9i Application Server, which has hundreds of customers
running production enterprise applications.

Application Server Clusters

Oracle Application Server 10g run-time services can be pooled and virtualized
via application server clusters. Every service within the Oracle Application
Server HTTP, J2EE, Web cache, Web Services, LDAP, portal and others
can be distributed across multiple machines in a grid. New features in Oracle
10g enable performance thresholds to be defined beyond which new application
server instances can automatically be added and started (or relinquished) to
process additional work on new nodes of a grid, delivering capacity on demand.
With Oracle 10g, an administrator can define a set of policies or business rules
that affect how individual work is provisioned across multiple machines.
Specifically, workload allocation can be influenced by resource consumption
metrics, such as CPU or memory usage, or application-specific metrics, such
as transaction throughput or JDBC connections, or workload can be
provisioned based on schedules, such as peak times of day or end of quarter.
Oracle Application Server 10g provides out-of-the-box instrumentation that
captures these various metrics and creates advisories based on historical and
real-time information to help administrators make the best policy choices.
Oracle Application Server 10g also provides several availability enhancements.
Because Oracle 10g includes clustering of every service within the application
server, there is no single point of failure. Both planned and unplanned downtime
of an individual instance will simply cause requests to be routed to another
node. Because Application Server 10g includes efficient session replication, any
type of failure (even that of a J2EE application holding state) will remain
transparent to the user. Application Server 10g further improves application
reliability through its interaction with Oracle Real Application Clusters. If an
instance in the back-end database goes down, Application Server 10g is notified
to reconnect. Without notification from a failed instance, an application server
would wait for an IP time out, which takes several minutes, but the multi-tier
failover notification feature reduces recovery time in such cases to mere
seconds, and both failure and recovery remain transparent to the user.

Identity Management

Centralized application user administration becomes even more important in a

grid environment. Identity management features within Application Server 10g
simplify and centralize account creation, suspension, and deletion and privilege
modification, all of which lower administration costs and reduce security
vulnerabilities.

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 10

Oracle provides centralized user provisioning and single sign-on for users
across all applications deployed to the Oracle Application Server. Access
privileges for all applications can be created and revoked through a single
interface. Identities can be managed through Oracle Internet Directory, a
standards-based LDAP directory that benefits from the availability and
scalability of being built on the Oracle Database.

Application Development Framework

Tightly integrated with Oracle Application Server 10g are the development tools
that enable companies to quickly develop custom internet applications, and then
easily deploy those applications to Oracle Application Server.
Applications for scientific grids, such as SETI@home, must be designed
explicitly to run on loosely connected grids. In contrast, enterprise applications
do not need to be re-designed to exploit the availability, scalability, and
performance benefits of enterprise grids. When applications are deployed to an
application server in a grid, those applications benefit immediately from the
transparent workload distribution, load balancing, and scheduling necessary to
efficiently coordinate work across multiple servers.
To gain additional benefits from grid computing, however, enterprise
applications can expose their behavior to other applications and to management
tools through standardized interfaces in a service-oriented architecture. Oracle
Developer Suite 10g, which includes JDeveloper 10g, enables developers to
create dynamic Web sites, J2EE applications, and Web services and to make
these services accessible through enterprise portals and wireless devices.
Applications designed to a service-oriented architecture can leverage a set of
standards-based internet protocols to communicate with other applications and
heterogeneous resources across a grid. Designing to a service-oriented
architecture enables companies to reduce development time and integration
costs.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control is the complete, integrated, central
management console and underlying framework that automates administrative
tasks across sets of systems in a grid environment. Grid Control helps reduce
administration costs through automation and policy-based standardization. With
Oracle Grid Control, IT professionals can group multiple hardware nodes,
databases, application servers, and other targets into single logical entities. By
executing jobs, enforcing standard policies, monitoring performance and
automating many other tasks across a group of targets instead of on many
systems individually, Grid Control enables IT staff to scale with a growing grid.
Because of this feature, the existence of many small computers in a grid
infrastructure does not increase management complexity.

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 11

Software Provisioning

Because of the potentially large number of physical nodes, its especially

important in a grid environment that installation and configuration of the
software running on those nodes is fast and requires no human intervention.
Manually installing software on hundreds of nodes would be time consuming
and cumbersome. Administrators would certainly find ways to work around a
manual installation, but the workarounds could lead to unsupportable upgrade
situations and lost information about the configuration of the system.
With Grid Control, Oracle 10g automates installation, configuration, and cloning
of Application Server 10g and Database 10g across multiples nodes. Oracle
Enterprise Manager provides a common framework for software provisioning
and management, allowing administrators to create, configure, deploy, and
utilize new servers with new instances of the application server and database as
they are needed. This framework is used not only to provision new systems but
also to apply patches and upgrade existing systems.
In Oracle Application Server 10g, applications can be deployed once to a single
application server instance, registered with the central repository, then
automatically deployed to all relevant nodes in the grid. As changes are made to
the application and as new nodes are added to the grid, nodes can be kept in
sync.

Application Service Level Monitoring

Oracle Grid Control views the availability and performance of the grid
infrastructure as a unified whole, as a user would experience it, rather than as
isolated storage units, processing boxes, databases, and application servers. An
administrator can trace a performance or availability problem as experienced by
a user from end to end from the user visible Web page, through external and
internal networks, to application code, application server, and database access.
Grid Control then allows an administrator to trace the root cause of the problem
down to the individual Java class, for example, or the individual system
configuration parameter.

OPEN GRID STANDARDS

With Oracle 10g, companies can begin implementing grid computing today, but
the open standards that will make grid computing as pervasive as the internet
are still under development, primarily by the Global Grid Forum (GGF). Oracle
is a GGF sponsor and participates in working groups, chairing the Data Access
and Integration (DAI) group. The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) is a
specification in active development within the GGF to define the general
services-based approach to grid computing. Other working groups, such as
Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) and OGSA-DAI, endeavor to define
the common interfaces and protocols for various grid services. Oracle plans to
actively support all grid-related open standards as they emerge.

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 12

CONCLUSION
Many phrases have been coined to describe new computing models created by
the IT industry. Grid computing is the emerging standard, and grid computing
is Oracles approach to lowering costs while improving quality. The benefits of
grid computing to businesses are real: increasingly flexible systems that can
largely self-manage; better availability, performance and scalability at lower
cost; and the opportunity for incremental investment and immediate return.
Grid computing will not radically change enterprise data centers, and it does not
require throwing out existing investments and best practices. However, grid
computing is also not just a passing fad. Enterprise grid computing, based on
the Oracle 10g infrastructure, will be the foundation of information technology
for the future, resulting in more cost effective computing for running more
nimble, data-driven businesses.

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing Page 13

Oracle 10g: Infrastructure for Grid Computing
September 2003
Author: Miranda Nash
Contributing Authors:
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