March 8, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- As grid technology continues to emerge as a cost-effective and practical alternative to shared hosting, one of the barriers to its more widespread adoption may be the understanding of the technology involved. To that end, one of the companies supplying that technology has taken it upon itself to help educate newcomers to grid technology.
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Last week, the grid and utility computing platform developer 3Tera (3tera.com) launched Grid University (3tera.com/grid_university.html), a series of more than 30 online educational sessions that provide live, interactive education on utility computing for Web applications.
The online courses are designed to provide software-as-a-service companies, enterprise users, hosting providers and open source developers with the information they need to understand the new technologies for Web-based data center operations, and apply them to their businesses.
3Tera first started offering its flagship grid technology solution, AppLogic, through Web hosting partners - and it realized quickly that the one-on-one training the company offered would simply not suffice for many customers.
"When a customer would sign up for a grid we would give them a two-hour training session," says Bert Armijo, VP of product management for 3Tera. "It became clear to us that there was more training needed, that people weren't coming with enough fundamental understanding of what a grid is, and sometimes didn't even know what basic operations were."
The company devised Grid University as a way of delivering that basic understanding to the widest possible audience as quickly as possible.
The free one-hour sessions are presented as live, interactive courses through the Web conferencing tool WebEx. Classes are presented Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. PST, and Friday at 10:00 a.m. PST. Each session includes a full question and answer period, enabling attendees to gain a full understanding of the curriculum. Additionally, 3Tera offers downloadable, recorded clips of sessions enabling attendees to catch up on any preliminary classes they may have missed.
The impressively broad curriculum includes three course levels: general knowledge, grid usage and grid maintenance. General knowledge is designed for attendees considering utility computing. Grid usage is designed for those who are actively evaluating AppLogic, or who use AppLogic grids. Finally, Grid maintenance is intended for system administrators and operations managers at Web hosting data centers.
"We made a conscious decision to open this up to the public - not just to people who are already using grid," says Armijo. "It's become an educational session that anyone can attend, even if they're not using AppLogic at the moment. They can see what's possible and what it takes to adopt it."
Armijo says the typical Grid University attendee comes from a company that is seeking a utility computing offering without having to invest in colocation or building its own infrastructure, including Web 2.0 and stats companies. The rest, he says, consist of either Web hosts or enterprise customers.
The inaugural course drew roughly 15 attendees, and users have signed up for courses throughout March and April. Not exactly enormous numbers, but Armijo considers the project successful so far.
"The interest in grid spread dramatically over the last six months," says Armijo, "and large enterprise customers we wouldn't have considered targets for ourselves are coming to us and asking 'can we see what this is and how it works?' It's a very exciting time. It looks like the next year is really going to be the breakout year for grid."
