Open Grid Alliance – Reimagining the Edge from the Ground Up

Suzanne McCormac, Senior Director, Marketing, VMware, Inc.

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Today, the OGA announced the availability of its vision paper for how they intend to turn the Open Grid into reality

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The internet is designed and operated as a communication vehicle. Today, it is between tedious and impossible to deploy applications providing next-generation experiences. To that end, the Open Grid Alliance (OGA) is working to upgrade and evolve the internet to support immersive experiences and unlock the transformative potential of emerging technologies. The OGA aims to create a comprehensive communications grid, called the Open Grid, which will act as a utility for hyper-composed applications, providing the right type of resources in the right place and at the right time. The Open Grid will be a system of systems that is naturally decentralized, localized, and federated. The OGA's approach involves assessing, monetizing, and evolving various technologies, partnering with cities and municipalities to create Innovation Zones, and guiding the development of reference architectures to facilitate co-creation across multiple sectors. The OGA invites hardware providers, service providers, data center operators, and last mile service providers to join their efforts in evolving the internet for a better future for everyone across the globe.

“Over the next few years, the concept of cloud computing is expected to expand beyond the current central data centers and edge nodes, even reaching into IoT devices and mobile phones. The vision of the Open Grid Alliance is to establish a foundation for a future use of this cloud continuum that is "directly affecting our planet and everyone living on it; in terms of culture, working, acting, thinking,” said Andreas Florath, Group Technology - Technology Architecture & Innovation - Cloud Architect at Deutsche Telekom AG and Co-chair of Grid Think Tank; co-author of the vision paper.

The challenge we face is the lack of functionality supporting demands of an immersive experience world, where timely interactions on planetary scale are required. Building on significant progress in automation and other technology advances, we must find ways to upgrade and evolve the internet to unlock the transformative potential of technologies directly affecting our planet and everyone living on it; in terms of culture, working, acting, thinking. To achieve this mission, we must devise new approaches for planning, designing and operating systems with high degrees of localization, autonomy, and intelligence. We must harmonize and optimize across all of these vectors to build this utility, which we call the Open Grid.

"This vision statement by the OGA clearly shows what the next step for cloud and edge will be: an Open Grid, decentralized and localized, using federation as the main mechanism for interoperability between any of our cloud and edge deployments," said Dr. Sven van der Meer, Director Distributed Fabrics, OCTO, VMware and Co-chair of Grid Think Tank; co-author of the vision paper.

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 To learn more about the OGA and how they plan to turn the Open Grid into reality, and how to get involved, read our Vision Paper.

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