Product Overview

GridServer is a highly scalable software infrastructure that allows application services to operate in a virtualized fashion, unattached to specific hardware resources. Client applications submit requests to the Grid environment and GridServer dynamically provisions services to respond to the request. Multiple client applications can submit multiple requests in parallel and GridServer dynamically creates multiple service instances to handle requests in parallel on different Grid nodes. This architecture is therefore highly scalable in both speed and throughput. For example, a single client sees scalable performance gains in the processing of multiple requests, and many applications and users see scalable throughput of the aggregate load.

A scalable architecture provides linear gains in performance with the addition of more hardware resources, while making no impact on the manageability of the distributed application platform. This means that the system must be as manageable with ten nodes as it is with a thousand nodes. GridServer offers this type of operating environment—incremental resources added to the system impact performance in a linear fashion, but have no effect on management—including deployment of application services; configuration and administration; runtime management and monitoring; and historical reporting and usage statistics.

This section is a high-level overview of the GridServer platform. It covers three separate areas: Grid Services, the GridServer architecture, and management and operations of the infrastructure.