You just can’t open an IT trade rag today without seeing a virtualization story. It’s gotten to the point where I had to disable my Google news alert for “virtualization” — because it was yielding too many darn results and distracting me from my full time job. It’s the buzzword du jour that’s crept into so many companies’ boilerplates and press releases, that it’s sometimes tough to tell where the real action is, versus who’s just trying to get caught in the current of the industry momentum around virtualization.One of the trends that I’ve been keeping an eye on as it relates to Grid is the amount of acquisitions and activity on the storage vendor side, targeting the virtualization of network-attached storage. It was big news last week that EMC is going to acquire Rainfinity — and there’s a good read today on Computerworld about clustered storage approaches to addressing throughput / scalability requirements.A few months ago, Bob Aiken, Director of Academic Research and Technology Initiatives at Cisco Systems, gave me something to think about in Grid’s role in the convergence of systems management and network management. He said, “There are two trends that are happening. One is that there’s going to see a lot more intelligence in the network — which has been going on already for a long time, but will continue to accelerate. Applications are going to have to become more ‘network aware,’ and the network is going to have to become more ‘application aware’ — and as a result there will be a blurring of boundaries between operating systems, networks and middleware.” In the enterprise’s early Grid discussions, most of the attention has been focused on the systems management implications of Grid — how it will affect provisioning, job scheduling, etc. But clearly, the networking side of the discussion is going to be very interesting to keep an eye on. How will networking policy, switching and routing directions drive Grid’s evolution? How will fire-walling and security issues be accommodated? Can the public Internet adequately carry Grid traffic, will organizations need to build dedicated networks for IntraGrids, or will “smart networking” devices be created to more effectively route Grid traffic? To what extent are today’s bandwidth, latency and I/O constraints being addressed for Grid environments? There are numerous, network-specific Grid efforts that have been taking place for years — but these topics are just now starting to creep into the media dialogue.Sun’s famous prediction “The Network is the Computer” is looking more spot-on every day — as enterprise continues to move from silo’d compute stacks to distributed resources that are networked to behave as a more cohesive system. It would appear that Cisco’s “Intelligence in the Network” mantra will continue to manifest itself in Grid discussions — as virtualization concerns continue to move further down the stack.I predict that the next year of Grid discussions will feature an increased involvement of companies in the traditional networking hardware markets and a new importance in issues surrounding the marriage of network and systems management. It will be fun to watch it unfold. Technology Industry