The evolution of distributed computing is cloudy computing.

While VMWare is great at carving up a computer into smaller partitions of a computer, VMWare falls short when you want to create a large virtual computer out of many smaller computers.

We all know and love the concept of reuse when it comes to SOA in the application development space. Now let's consider the power of reuse in the infrastructure layer.

The concept is called Services Oriented Infrastructure (SOI), and Grid Computing is alive and well in the SOI. Whereby many low-cost, low-heat, low-power blades are being pooled together on an as-needed basis to run high performance computing analytics and data aggregation functions to create a large virtual super computer with hundreds of processors and gigabytes of storage as a distributed level 2 cache.

Before you say that you've figured out virtualization because you are using LPAR technology from IBM on an AIX p-series or you've figured out how to get Linux running on an i-series OS/400 system or on a z-series mainframe, you must first answer this question... What am I doing to leverage the huge amounts of underutilized Intel and AMD win/lin resources in the datacenter?

Microsoft is not ignoring grid computing, and they've rebranded the Windows 2003 64bit Compute Cluster Edition (CCE) as simply HPC server. Other ISVs such as Platform Computing have been selling products like LSF and the new Enterprise Grid Orchestrator (EGO, and DataSynapse recently launched GridServer 5.0 with improved performance in a feature called "SpeedLink", as well as Fabric Server to automate the configuration and provisioning of J2EE container based applications. And the open source grid community has evolved since the creation of the Globus toolkit, and the GridGain folks have focused on cloud services integration with providers such as Google AppEngine and Amazon EC2.