What’s the difference between Cloud Computing & Grid Computing?
December 9, 2011
Cloud computing and Grid computing are two different realms of managing IT related work activities in the smoothest way possible.
Where cloud computing is a branch of Information technology that invites businesses to become virtual, grid computing on the other hand calls for a shared environment on a common computer system from multiple administrative domains. Although, both of them function with a purpose to provide a good percentage of scalability levels to high-end computer networks, the cost of deploying these is equally high…
An elaborated comparison between the two technologies is given below:
Cloud Computing
Cloud and cloud managed services are designed in such a manner so that businesses get rid of the hardware and software mess, which kills their quality time as well as money. Cloud, as per several researchers has provided a platform where three elements of IT IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cater to the requirements of the customers in the most flexible manner possible.
Characteristics features like managed and monitored cloud environment, load balancing, SRC (Security, Risk Management and Compliance Management), high scalability, a complete secured environment, cost-effective and extremely reliable.
For all IT organizations, that lack storage space and their servers hardly entertain any new data can opt for managed cloud services from reputed cloud providers. The role of these cloud providers is not till the time you avail services from them but they manage your entire in-house IT operations in the efficient way possible.
Apart from all these factors, disaster recovery and data backup plan in cloud technology helps to restore data at the time a server or data crashes. Incorporating disaster recovery and data backup plan is one of the essential parts of cloud computing and to make it run effectively and efficiently is the utmost priority of cloud providers.
Grid Computing
As grid computing works on the fundamental principle of shared environment of computer systems from multiple administrative domains, it gives rise to certain advantages in terms of boosting daily operations of a business enterprise. The advantages related to grid computing are as follows:
Foremost use of a grid computing network is to run an already running software application on a different as well as distant machine. Thus, it provides a flexible environment to run any application of different computer systems.
As it works on the basic principle of shared environment, grid computing breaks a single large task into several smaller ones through a distributed system on multiple computer networks. This helps to ease down work burden. Let us explain this point with an example.
Hypothetical example on shared grid environment:
Suppose, an IT organization is developing an application, which would help to run the daily attendance of all the employees. Now, because the company is huge, its employee strength is also quite large. Developing an application for their daily attendance is quite a painstaking task.
Thus, the higher management working on the project decides to do it in a shared grid environment. Why they chose of grid computing is because of the fact that the work of this software application can be distributed or computed on different computer networks for convenience sake and making in-house IT work environment more efficient.
When the application finishes its work on the distributed grids, it is sent back to the original computer network for final implementation.