Business rules and GRID computing

I was chatting at Gartner ITxpo with our friends at Appistry. They have been doing some work to get Blaze Advisor, Fair Isaac's business rules management system, running on their GRID product, Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric. They took a standard demonstration and got about 30,000 transactions/second sustained at 100% CPU utilization across 10 clients by submitting. This simulated an application that reads 1000 records from a DBMS, and submits them to Blaze Advisor. This was a highly scalable result also, showing very linear behavior for additional CPUs.

This was not perhaps a surprise - Blaze Advisor like most rules engines is designed to run well in whatever environment you have - but was interesting a I think GRID computing and business rules are natural allies. It seems to me that systems where agility is key can benefit both from business rules and GRID. The use of business rules gives business agility in terms of being able to change the way the systems responds when circumstances demand it. GRID gives agility in terms of being able to add or remove capacity, impacting throughput and performance, as and when required. A combined system offers capacity agility and behavioral agility. Cool.

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