Grid Component

The grid component is a super class of object that represents every managed entity, whether physical or logical, within an enterprise grid. Grid components are recursive, in that they may be aggregated to form other grid components, or decomposed into their constituent grid components.

Examples of grid components include, but are not necessarily limited to - Traditional resources such as servers, switches, disks, arrays and routers. These are considered to be elemental grid components.

• Less obvious resources such as a software distribution or perhaps data.
• Services, such as CRM, ERP etc.
• Everything in between.

Thus, for example, an ERP service may be decomposed into database, application server and web tiers. These may in turn be decomposed into instances that are bound to operating system instances and servers. Each of these is considered to be a grid component. Whether a grid component is viewed as a service or as a resource and depends on context. Each grid component has a life cycle which has to be managed and may encompass a number of phases, including:

• Add
• Configure
• Start
• Stop
• Unconfigure
• Remove

See also: Enterprise Grid, Resource, Service