This year is a big year for grid computing. After so long waiting more than 2 years, grid technology has been commercialized successfully and all of us could see significant impacts in a few months. I have just seen 2 interesting press news.

• Crosswalk launches iGrid Storage System
• Fujitsu successfully tested grid-based load balancing system

At present, iGrid provides a block-based backend and a file-based frontend by NFS and CIFS protocols, respectively. Of course, these protocols are not as good as I expected. By the way, it works! Crosswalk plans to add iSCSI and Fiber Channel later. Well, iGrid is just a storage systems with grid-like approach. iGrid doesn’t rely on any grid technology. In other words, iGrid should be categorized as a NAS solution for wide-area network. Just to let you know, Gfarm is an alternative truly grid-based file system. Note that Gfarm is freely available. Thanks AIST! IMHO, iGrid could be your choice if you want strong after-sale support. Open-source projects assume users keen enough to handle unexpected errors.

Fujitsu and France Telecom have together developed a load balancing system based on grid technology. And now, they claimed that the system has been successfully tested to balance loads among servers located in Paris, Tokyo, and Kawasaki and brought higher performance than conventional systems. The most interesting in this press is this collaboration has started since December 2004. It takes about 15 months for 2 big firms to develop a grid solution. That means new vendors have to spend longer times to develop similar products comparable to this one. Fortunately, major players are already started since last year or earlier.

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