This article by Intel brings together three themes - virtualization, services, and grid computing - to create a hybrid approach to architecture and application design.
While the idea of virtual service-oriented grids may be a new business concept, the technologies that build the groundwork for this idea go back many decades to the early days of computing research. That being said, the combination of these technologies brings non-functional, yet significant capabilities to a system. Virtual service-oriented grids have the capacity to fundamentally change the way business is conducted in much the same way that the Internet did by reinserting a middleman in the form of software, rather than human. The key to this paradigm shift lies in services, the abstraction of interoperability and reuse.
The article begins with a bit of history, the development of the three technologies and their contribution to business software design, then describes how the combination offer benefits for the enterprise that are greater than any of the three in isolation. An industry example concludes the article.
The authors include three architects (Enrique Castro-Leon, ,Jackson He, and Parviz Peiravi) and a strategist (Mark Chang) with backgrounds in software development, data center architecture, manageability, and enterprise solutions. Read Introduction to Virtual Service-Oriented Grids for a basic understanding of this techology.