Decisions - Grid computing - Grid and bear it.

(From Financial Director)

Byline: Dominic Tonner.

When it came to funding IT projects, finance directors rarely kept their chequebooks in their pockets in the latter half of the last decade.

Spending on emerging technologies exploded, as organisations rushed to web-enable their customer-facing systems and overhaul their creaking back-office IT to fend off the Millennium Bug. But the harsh reality was that most of the technology was not needed.

Well, like a brewery diversifying into hangover cures, the IT industry says it has a tonic for businesses that overindulged in the 1990s - grid computing. The idea is simple yet compelling.

At any given moment in a big company, there will be a few computers struggling to handle a particular workload while all the remaining machines remain idle. By connecting computers so that processing and storage capabilities are pooled, spare capacity can be shared out when needed.

Recently, IT infrastructures have become incredibly complex and inefficient, making the integration and management of it all an enormous and expensive challenge. Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, admits that things have got out of hand. "A systems administrator today can manage somewhere between 15 and 30 systems, but it should be 500," he says. "It takes weeks to deploy a new network service, whereas it should take days or hours. We'd prefer it if our customers were able to spend that money on computer power, storage capacity and increased bandwidth." Grid, he says, is one answer.