As we attempt to get back into our regular schedules after (in many cases) extended holiday vacations, it can be difficult to re-acclimate fully to the working world. The trick, if you ask me, is to ease back into things, knowing full well that the weeks to come will offer few chances for respite. Partially because of a severe news shortage during the last, abbreviated workweek, and partially with this philosophy in mind, this issue should serve as an appetizer to get you ready for the feature-packed weeks and months to come.

We begin with a feature interview with Voltaire’s senior vice president of marketing Patrick Guay, who gives his thoughts on the company’s very busy and highly successful past year. What is interesting, however, is that although this article discusses the past, some of Voltaire’s accomplishments in 2007 are in areas that should continue to grow in popularity in 2008, such as low-latency electronic trading and virtualized resource pools. Concerning the former, the past year saw various partnerships (including a few by Voltaire) between software and hardware vendors, as well as between ISVs and application-platforms providers, to minimize latency when accessing market data, and I think we can expect to see them start to bear fruit this year. As for the latter, well, I think the late-year hubbub around cloud computing proves the long-term importance of virtualizing and automating access to resources. All of that and its IPO! I’m sure we can expect to the company do even better in the years to come as more and more organizations come to realize the necessity of dynamism is the datacenter.

Also, as you might have noticed, we have been running quite a bit of editorial around the OGF standards demonstrations that took place at SC07. This week is no different, as we have one more piece about the HPC Basic Profile spec — which has led to several popular grid middleware solutions being interoperable — and another focusing on interoperability demos among some of the world’s leading research networks.

Hitting upon the news from last week, the reality is that there wasn’t much. However, there is one very interesting announcement involving IBM’s purchase — reportedly for between $300 and $350 million — of XIV, an Israeli storage provider whose flagship product, Nextra, is based on grid and virtualization technologies. We hope to have more details on this in due time. Other news items worth that might be of interest include: “NYSGrid Partners with OSG,” “Chelsio Gets $25M” and “SETI@home Seeking Volunteers.”

Elsewhere on the Web, it has been noted to me that a post entitled “How to Use Grids to Cure Cancer” has been getting quite a bit of traffic at the Grid Gurus blog site, so I thought I would point our readers’ attention there, as well. The entry actually discusses the finer points of deploying a grid in the medical/biotech field, where Part 11 regulations define what will suffice as valid electronic records, signatures, etc. The title might seem a little misleading but, hey, you can’t utilize a grid to create that wonder drug if your system isn’t compliant.

Finally, I mentioned earlier that there will be plenty to talk about in the weeks to come, and that is because over the next month or so we will be getting the latest update from Platform Computing, and can expect to hear about new products/releases from both IBM and DataSynapse. We also will have features on a few other up-and-coming companies who are making a name for themselves in the on-demand world. And the icing on the cake is that I just picked up a copy of Nicholas Carr’s new book “The Big Switch,” which asserts that computing — both personal and corporate — will undoubtedly move to a utility model in the relatively near future. I’ll give you my take on the book and see how Carr’s predictions fit in with what is going on in the utility computing space as GRIDtoday has been covering it.

To end, I’d like to alert our readers that first quarter of this year also will bring some big changes to this publication. I’d tell you to keep your eyes open for them, but something tells me they will be difficult to miss.

Happy New Year!

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Comments about GRIDtoday are welcomed and encouraged. Write to me, Derrick Harris, at [email protected].