Here you can find a selection of resources advising on the business aspects of Grid, such as how to construct the business case for migration to Grid and how to calculate the return on investment (ROI).
An analysis tool for Grid and cloud implementations
The Future of Healthcare: eHealth and Grid Computing
The Value of Cloud in Enterprise
The Business case for Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing – Enterprise Perspectives
Grid Computer Aided Engineering (GridCAE)
BREIN – Reliable Grids for real business
Grid Computing for insurance companies
SLAs for Financial Service providers
Distributed Computing Economics
Service oriented infrastructure: Meeting customers needs
Service Oriented Architecture : Insights from the frontline
Cloud Computing Architectural Manifesto
An analysis tool for Grid and cloud implementations
This article describes an analysis tool that was developed by the BEinGRID project for the analysis of the business plans of 25 Grid pilots ran between June 2006 and November 2009. This article describes how it was implemented. This tool can be adopted to analysing any set of pilot implementations
A method of analysis for Grid pilots
The Future of Healthcare: eHealth and Grid Computing
Grid Computing and the Future of Healthcare. Grid Talk.2009.
Introduction
Grid computing is playing a key role in the growing area of eHealth, where it is harnessed to provide storage and computing power for initiatives in several biomedical disciplines. With grid-enabled tools researchers can investigate diseases and rare conditions faster, while physicians can harness grid computing to diagnose and treat patients. What’s more, the integration of huge amounts of medical data could mean the beginning of personalised treatment.
Abstract
The GridBriefing on the role of grid computing in healthcare examines a number of key eHealth projects in Europe, explores some of the challenges involved and offers expert views on the subject.
The EU has invested significant amounts of money in the development of eHealth tools and systems since the early 1990s with policy makers, medical personnel and IT experts working closely to further eHealth through the Assembly of European Regions e-He@lth Network.
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a key role in this context, with the aim of making healthcare more efficient and more widely accessible across Europe. Grid computing is harnessed in specific areas, such as providing the processing power needed for drug discovery or o visualise body organs. With grid, medical staff can access health data irrespective of their location and healthcare workers can work more effectively and share information. Another important role of grid computing is that it enables more individualised forms of healthcare. The main benefits are saving time and money, allowing a broader scope of action and gaining results not possible through traditional IT services.
Examples showcased in the GridBriefing span radio therapy for cancer treatment, DNA imaging, Alzheimer’s disease, paediatrics, drug discovery, monitoring pandemics like the recent swine flu, new models to investigate the human body as a single complex system, as well as cross-border collaborations. Specific challenges covered include using grids in eHealth and the major task of integrating healthcare systems.
GridBriefing: The Future of Healthcare: eHealth and Grid Computing
Understanding Clouds
Source: Dr David Snelling, Fujitsu Labs Europe, OGF Vice Chair of Standards, IT-tude.com Certified Contributor
David Snelling identifies what exactly potential consumers need to understand about Cloud computing before adoption. This can be of benefit to both consumers and stakeholders in Cloud technology.
Optimising the Grid
Source: Alistair Dunlop, Citihub & IT-Tude.com Certified Contributor
Application development and infrastructure managers are under increasing pressure to improve grid utilisation efficiency and hence avoid continual hardware expansion. "Optimising The Grid" describes application and grid optimisation approaches that combined, are capable of delivering platform efficiencies in excess of 400%.
The Value of Cloud in Enterprise
Source: IT-Tude.com
The article offers a vision of how cloud computing will be adopted by the business community and some of the benefits that it will bring. The move to cloud by businesses will be a gradual one with businesses going through a period of combining the use of internal and external resources to run applications. Examples of cloud providers such as Amazon and Salesforce.com are explained.
The Value of Cloud in Enterprise
The Business case for Cloud Computing
Source: IT-Tude.com
This page presents a series of articles examining that advantages that cloud computing can bring, enabling you to make the business case for cloud computing in your organisation.
The Business case for Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing – Enterprise Perspectives
Maik Lindner, SAP Research, certified contributor
Clouds - benefits & barriers
The flexibility that comes with cloud computing is creating increasing momentum around this new paradigm. Services running in a cloud environment can scale to actual demand, bringing new business models in the ICT sector as start-ups and spin-offs do not necessarily need significant upfront investment. This so-called shift from CapEx to OpEx brings an obvious need for detailed calculations and predictions of service use.
Cloud Computing – Enterprise Perspectives
Grid Computer Aided Engineering
Date: January 2009
Source: IT-Tude.com
This video and PDF describe how ICON were able to use the Grid to reduce the cost of running complex simulations whilst increasing flexibility and efficiency.
Grid for Architects
Date: January 2009
Source: IT-Tude.com
This video and PDF describe how architects can take advantage of a Grid service developed by CETIC which reduces the costs of producing 3D renderings of planned constructions and provides the resources required to meet peak processing demand.
BREIN – Reliable Grids for real business
Business objective driven reliable and intelligent grids for real business
With the growing demand for fast, reliable and electronic business provisioning, the according middleware needs to hide complexity from the users whilst retaining full control from both the provider and consumer. This is one of the main objectives of the BREIN project, which intends to address this by providing tools that permit different business actors to do what they are good at. This means that each actor is operating within a field they know and understand, and can collaborate to increase efficiency and thereby wealth.
This whitepaper sets out the business objectives of the BREIN research project.
Date: August 2008
The business whitepaper was provided by the BREIN Consortium
Grid Computing for insurance companies
Date: April 2008.
Source: Hewlett-Packard
This white paper gives an overview of Grid technology and the benefits of Grid computing. With a particular focus on the insurance sector, it goes on to describe HP's grid solutions and related offerings.
Grid Computing for insurance companies
SLAs for Financial Service providers
Improving business opportunities of financial service providers through service level agreements: An example with Implied Volatility
The calculation of the Implied Volatility of stock options is a computationally expensive process which generally exceeds the resources available at a customer’s site. Financial service providers therefore offer the required services, dynamically adapting the consumption of their own resources to the customer’s requirements. The success of such a business model relies on carefully negotiated and observed Service Level Agreements between the different parties involved. The NextGRID project, driven by the adaption of several business scenarios to next generation Grid technologies, has designed and implemented an Implied Volatility framework which applies dynamic negotiation of Service Level Agreements to improve the existing solution. This paper discusses this business scenario and the different core components integrated to generate the Implied Volatility framework.
Source: NextGRID
Full Report: Business opportunities for financial service providers through SLAs: An example with Implied Volatility
The Savvy Manager’s Guide
Grid Computing, The Savvy Manager’s Guide
Pawel Plaszczak and Richard Wellner Jr
Morgan Kaufmann, September 2005
This non-technical book answers key questions on Grid computing in business terms. It focuses heavily on the competitive advantages grid computing can offer. The book also has an accompanying website that includes new and up-to-date material.
Distributed Computing Economics
Jim Gray, Microsoft Research
Date: March 2003
This paper discusses the economics of distributed computing and raises some important issues concerning the cost benefit analysis. It discusses the circumstances where Grid computing should have an economic advantage and where it may not. This has implications for how companies structure wide-scale distributed computing.
Distributed Computing Economics
Service oriented infrastructure: Meeting customer needs
Modern organisations seek to efficiently utilise ICT infrastructure, while at the same time ensuring that components of the infrastructure can be substituted and augmented dynamically. The 3-layer SOI model presented here is a response to this. The model builds on the service-oriented philosophy, which is already having significant market impact e.g., through the deployment of Software-as-a-Service. The SOI model also owes its provenance in part to the concept of Grid Computing; an approach to computing which offers performance benefits and the ability to share complementary resources. Today a new concept, that of the virtual hosting environment, is being developed, building both on SOI and grid computing.
Source: BT plc
Service oriented infrastructure: Meeting customer needs
Service Oriented Architecture : Insights from the frontline
Service Oriented Architecture, commonly referred to as SOA, has a lot to live up to. IT industry vendors, analysts and other commentators have variously positioned it as everything from a silver bullet to solve the World’s systems integration problems to a way of achieving the ultimate level of alignment between IT and the business. In this report, authors consider the results of a research study completed in June 2006, within which feedback was gathered from IT and business professionals working in mainstream businesses. The results reveal an interesting mix of findings, corroborating some of the things we commonly hear from vendors and analysts, but challenging others.
Source: Freeform Dynamics
Read more at SOA: Insights from the frontline
Cloud Computing Architectural Manifesto
With cloud computing becoming a reality for typical web users and an increase in corporate use on the horizon, the essence and key characteristics of cloud computing are addressed in this document by Mikko Kontio, Softera.
Issues surrounding cloud computing are explored such as the importance to customers pay-per-use services; characteristics of cloud such as scalability, on demand resource allocation, and economies of scale; the layers in the cloud computing stack, ranging from infrastructure to the client layer; and the risks of cloud computing that customers and future vendors should consider.
Cloud computing is not just a trend that might happen one day. It's a reality; typical Web users use cloud services daily whether they know it or not. In the near future we’ll probably see a stronger trend of corporate services and applications moving toward clouds. Naturally there are certain applications that corporations would rather run in their own servers, but the majority of corporate applications should be appropriate for cloud computing.
Source: IBM
Read the full document on cloud computing
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