Grid adoption perks up

摘要

In the staid world of insurance companies. The Hartford is making a name for itself by lashing together 200 servers to create a powerful grid that's tackling compute-intensive financial analytics. "Grid has mainly been used for academia, but it is actually much more useful for corporate business," says Chris Brown, director of advanced technologies at Hartford Life. He says The Hartford had been running into scalability issues both in terms of hardware and software that could handle the company's growing needs. The Hartford spent six months designing the grid network, grid-enabling its applications and deploying the Condor open source grid management software developed by the University of Wisconsin. The grid network went live in September. Although Condor is free, Brown says The Hartford spent significant amounts of money on integration and software development. But Brown says the benefits are enormous.