ORACLE 10G: Grid or not?

Question

The following is an excerpt from Ian Foster's article on What is a Grid?.
<....coordinates resources that are not subject to centralized control …
(A Grid integrates and coordinates resources and users that live
within different control domains—for example, the user’s desktop
vs. central computing; different administrative units of the same
company; or different companies; and addresses the issues of
security, policy, payment, membership, and so forth that arise in
these settings. Otherwise, we are dealing with a local management
system.)>
My main point of confusion is that going from ORACLE 10G's capabilities, especially with new features like the 10G Database ASM, Streams, Transportable Tablespaces, 10G Application Server APM, Workload Management and all of 10G Enterprise Manager Grid Control array of features, systems built on this infrastructure cant be referred to as a grid, atleast from the foregoing excerpt.
Please can someone put me right, assuming i am going wrong. I am researching into grid technology and where Oracle technology fits.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Hi,
you shouldn't confuse - Oracle Grid is just hype
but seriously this one is enterprise grid computing or
computing on demand or utility computing.
It's different from academic (classics) grid.
Main goal of enterprise grid - reduce TCO of datacenters.
It's based on usual "idiots" report of Gather (or may
be IDS) that server's CPUs are too underload (idle).
So you should dynamically distribute workload between
few servers in RAC cluster (now named as Grid).
And of course, it will be work automagically
so bosses can fire all datacenter's personnel
and manage just push one red button.
SL