The blurry line between event driven data management and grid architecture

Ever found yourself describing a design that you think is so 'obvious' that everyone must already understand it, only to find that almost no one understands it... and then find that there is a product that uses it?

That has happened to me more than once.  It is frustrating.

So, I'm at the local meeting of the IASA listening to a presentation on 'grid' computing, which is a distributed computing architecture that ranges from SETI-style multi-processing to wide ranging smart-cache technologies.  Interesting stuff.

Then it occurs to me that the simple model I've been describing for event driven cache management, for well over two years, is really a simple form of the same data replication that is enabled by these tools.  I didn't think of it originally... I had heard an ESB vendor describe this design many years ago, but he didn't give it a name.  The design stuck in my head but I didn't have any good category for it.

Well, at least I now know what to call it.  Gigaspaces calls this the 'Data Grid.'  Other vendors have products that compete, from what I'm told.  I'll have to dig.

Liking it.  Now, I need to find it on the MS stack...