GridGain - How It All Got Started

So, how did it all get started?

The project got started about 3 years ago by Nikita Ivanov and myself. Generally, having a significant experience in grid computing, we were to a large extent fed up with existing grid computing solutions. Majority of them were (and still are) either too expensive or too unusable. Just take a look at Globus , Sun GridEngine, or Platform for example. Globus is a command line tool penetrated by a whole soup of technologies, from C++ and scripting to Java and Web Services (good example of design by committee by the way). Sun Grid Engine is burdened by the same plague of complexity and inflexibility, which is the main reason why Sun's utility computing initiative was dead on arrival. Platform and many other commercial products, besides being overly complex to use, are extremely expensive. Some of these products don't even let you download an evaluation copy without having to contact sales (!) Common... in this day and age?

And this is how GridGain got born. We from the get-go decided that the product should be Open Source simply because we don't believe that paying up front is the right model for middleware. Middleware does not bring any revenue to customers right away. It usually involves a development cycle, then testing, and then production push. So why should a customer pay while no money is earned? Professional Open Source allows users of middleware products to have a no-cost project jump start and then purchase professional support when their product goes into production and starts earning. It just makes sense!

Another major focus of GridGain was Simplicity. That is not to say that we didn't focus on advanced grid computing features, such as scalability, fail-over, scheduling, deployment, load balancing, etc... We did, of course, but we approached it so it would be very simple to use and pluggable where custom behavior was needed. Just take a look at our forums or user testimonials, and you will quickly see that most users are able to start with a quick prototype in a matter of hours.

So, now, we are already 2 major releases behind, have a strong R&D team in Saint Petersburg, Russia, impressive customer list, and quite large and rapidly growing community that keeps us moving forward with constant feedback and feature requests. As we usually say at GridGain, grid computing should be fun, simple, and productive!