Grids for Enterprise Applications

Enterprise applications implement business resource management systems, customer relationship management systems, and general systems for commerce. These applications rely on infrastructure that represents the vast majority of the world’s computing resources. Most of this infrastructure is lightly utilized and inflexible. This paper considers the role of Grid technologies in increasing the utilization and agility of enterprise infrastructure. Requirements of enterprise applications upon Grid resource management systems are introduced along with a discussion of how recent advances in resource virtualization make such management possible. We describe a Resource Access Management Framework for enterprise application infrastructure and identify the resulting requirements upon Grid service protocols.