The Evolution of Grid Computing: The Basic Ideas and Concepts of Grid Computing from the Early Beginning through its Evolution towards State-of-the-Art Grid Computing Infrastructures

"Divide et impera!" - The concept of subdividing complex monolithic tasks into simpler units of work is neither new nor IT-specific. But the basic idea behind grid computing would well be communicated by this ancient roman strategy. Today's IT-systems are sized for their peak-load. Pooling all available computing resources into a single set of services that can easily be scaled and shared among different workloads, immediately reacting to dynamically changing needs, would be an appropriate way of overcoming economic or technical constraints and limitations. The latest development is Enterprise Grid Computing based on new standards. Further distributed enterprise databases with regard to particular paradigms of the architecture for grid computing are explored. Since nearly all-major IT vendors have or at least claim to have products ready for Enterprise Grid Computing some examples are given. Concluding possible future trends in the field are examined.