It's quite something isn't it - grid technology - the concept of a super computer at your disposal, able to provide high performance computing resources to your entire IT estate.

However, rather than hark on about latency and proximity concerns that also challenge grid deployments  many IT managers are discovering there is the spectre of significant opportunity cost lurking behind the scenes: power,  cooling and to a lesser extent the physical space required.

Running a grid is not simple - if you're an investment bank that has various 'farms' of servers and been thinking how to cut down on the blades and move to a grid approach to achieve linear scalability you've still got the issue of power and cooling to conquer!

Is there another option?  Ian Posner thinks so... he's a passionate advocate of performance - profiling, tuning and accelerating mission critical applications so that they bring more bang for buck.   Today Ian and I shot the breeze over how to get round the power/cooling/cost challenge through re-engineering.

Instead of moving to a grid there are other options that one can investigate - addressing the issue of engineering one should conduct due diligence on the market in acceleration products - one company in particular has begun to stand out from the crowd: ClearSpeed - rather than regurgitate content here's a link to their raison d'être.

Tactically, this approach is very appealing - running acceleration cards in critical servers alleviates the need for more complex solutions such as application virtualisation.

If this got your juices flowing then this presentation should let them loose :-)