Grid Case Study

Grid computing: business application

After the theoretical analysis of grid computing and an overview of the advantages and the drawbacks of this technology on the business world it may be interesting to have a more practical view on what the implementation of a grid system in concrete terms can do to help a company that encounter the need to consolidate or enhance its IT infrastructure.

In that purpose we have selected two empirical case studies which are mainly based on studies conducted by Mainstay Partners, an independent consulting firm.

The first one is about Ohio Savings Bank, a bank specialized in residential mortgages and for the second case we will focus our interest on Dell which has replaced one of its existing IT infrastructures used in Europe, Middle East and Africa with grid technology in 2004.

Ohio Savings Bank case:

In 2004, Ohio Savings began to feel the effects of the expansion of the business "that was stressing its IT infrastructure and becoming a drain on financial and human resources" .

The bank had to cope with the management of different hardware, operating systems and applications which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars annually between the downtime, maintenance costs and salaries .

The company's goals were mainly to gain and retain potential customers "through personalized, profitable offerings" . The fact that the clients mostly interact with the bank's automated services made the bank begin to consider moving to a grid computing solution that "would create a service-based architecture for its call center, mortgage, and data warehouse applications" .

Ohio savings took the decision of investing around $800,000 in a grid system focused on its call center and, according to Mainstay Partners, the bank "will garner 1.98 million in benefits over a 5-year period" mostly on savings and improvements from consolidating the bank's technology infrastructure .

The strategic benefits identified by Mainstay Partners are as follow :

* Removes the variability of multiple dealers

* Standardizes and scales across all business applications

* Accommodates and balances mixed workloads

* Helps direct customers to more specialized, profitable offerings

* Optimizes use of customer data and analyses

* Provides the foundation for service-based architecture

* Improves the job satisfaction of IT staff

Furthermore, reinvesting in an upgraded but same IT platform would have ultimately led

the company to the similar dilemma which occurred in 2004.

Dell Inc. case:

In 2004, Dell began feeling the need to act on its aging Europe-based offline order management system. In stake were the system availability and likely the line manufacturing . Furthermore Dell had to deal with a growing volume of customers and the system capacity limits were nearly reached.

In the perspective of changing its system, Dell's principal wills were :