Of course, most CIOs would be happy achieving much more modest utilization rates.

"The shortest and best route to getting more utilization, better capacity, is with something like grid," says Philip Cushmaro, CIO and managing director at Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB).

Cushmaro’s organization began using grid computing back in 1999 for overnight batch jobs, work that wasn’t particularly time-sensitive and could make good use of otherwise wasted CPU cycles. But as technology improved, CSFB began moving other applications to grid, including critical financial risk management tools. And Cushmaro says the company will investigate other uses for grid. "When everybody goes home at night, all our desktops are doing nothing," he says. "Wouldn’t it be nice if we could use those?"

Grid expansion is also on the mind of Debora Horvath, senior vice president and CIO at GE Financial Assurance. Last August, her group began using a grid to run actuarial applications to make financial projections. These computations used to take as long as a day to run a job on a farm of 10 dedicated servers. But by linking 100 desktops (using DataSynapse software) and simply grabbing idle time on the machines, GE Financial Assurance was able to realize performance gains of 10 times over the dedicated (and now turned off) servers without end users noticing anything but the faster response times. Horvath is so happy with the results that her group is already examining new applications that could take advantage of grid. "We have enough other compute-intensive work that we can continue to use grid again and again and again," she says.

What to Say to the Server Huggers

Even with the economies of grid showing promise (including performance gains and the opportunity to take advantage of existing systems rather than buying new hardware), there are still roadblocks to widespread adoption, user resistance among them.

"Whenever you take a significantly different technology to your customers, they may be skeptical," says Horvath. "When we told people we were going to take away the dedicated servers and use their PCs, there were skeptics. But after we did a pilot, they were won over."

In fact, according to Kevin Gordon, GE Financial Assurance’s vice president for IT, new technology and business development, turning the naysayers around took less than half an hour. "We had the actuaries in for a training session. And we took a job that they’d run overnight, and we started it at the beginning of the training session, and within 20 minutes, before the training was over, we had the job completed," he says.