Globus Grid and Firewalls: Issues and Solutions in a Utility Data Center Environment

The “Grid” has become the next incarnation of the utility computing vision: seamless access to data and services anytime, anywhere. Sharing a utility infrastructure requires high standards of security. Grid platforms such as the Globus Toolkit, the Grid Engine, Platform or the forthcoming Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) include various security mechanisms from encrypted communication, user authentication and authorization to hosting environments for running Grid applications. The paper reviews the status of the Globus Grid Toolkit (version 2.0) from a perspective of providing Grid services from behind corporate firewalls to Grid users outside the firewall. Issues are discussed and solutions are presented that have been investigated in a case study running Globus in a Utility Data Center and connecting it to Globus at an outside University crossing a firewall. The second part of the paper discusses the OGSA notion of a hosting environment providing protected and secure execution of Grid applications and how resource virtualization capabilities of the Utility Data Center can be utilized for this purpose.