Written by Heeyong Park
Date: 6/18
1.
Overview
2.
Design Concept Comparison
3.
Architecture Comparison
4.
Features Comparison
5.
Conclusion
6.
References
This report is intended to compare the Groove and OCEAN in perspective of design concept, functionalities and architecture.
Groove Networks is founded in 1997 by Ray Ozzie. Ray is a best-known creator of the
Lotus Notes, the world's leading groupware product with more than 60 million users and the incumbent middleware of IBM. He is one of the gurus who see how the next generation of the
Internet is coming. As most of the gurus say, he also anticipates that the Peer-to-Peer networking will be the core enforcement of the Internet 3.0, he consider the WWW as the
Internet 2.0.
So that it is important to see how a person who has a vision of the next generation of the Internet made his actual business model, in this case Groove Network.

In order to compare the design concept of the two projects, Groove and OCEAN, we should see how different the goal, illustration of the virtual organizations, and the layered architecture are.
1.
Goal
‘
provides a virtual space for a small group of people with a context as rich as the Web in an environment as spontaneous as email’, said Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove networking.
The goal of Groove is to provide a virtual workspace for users to share their ideas and information. So, it is different from OCEAN whose goal is to give a platform to utilize idle computer resources.
2.
Illustration of Virtual Organization
A virtual organization or company is one whose members are geographically apart, usually working by computer e-mail and groupware while appearing to others to be a single, unified organization with a real physical location. If we see the differences of the illustration of
Groove and OCEAN, we could easily see the main differences.

Firstly, let’s see the Groove. The figure 2 illustrates the VO of Groove.
Pure-Peer Network Groove Agent Center-based server bots
Group Meeting,
Instant Messaging,
Emailing
Synchronization Service,
Connection Service,
Storage Service
<Figure 1. Groove Network Virtual Organization>
License management,
Component management,
Usage Reporting
The Groove Network is consisted of three components;
 Pure peer-to-peer network, which is the place where the peers can do group meeting, scheduling and having discussion
 Groove agents, which do the roles of backing up peer information, querying and updating peer requests, event monitoring
 Center-based server bots, which does save customer history, transaction processing, and workflow/business process automation
Groove is an intermediate platform between peer-to-peer network and client/server architecture. Groove architecture integrates P2P and Client/Server by putting agents and servers in the middle of peer networks. Groove tries to support IT managers to control the peer

network maintenance and save peers history when a peer is offline and security in order to maximize the synergy of web of context richness and peer-to-peer network of spontaneousness.
In the other hand, Groove has the disadvantage of both architectures.
The main problem is that Groove platform is basically not fully distributed. Because of the reason, Groove is still having problems inherited from client/server architecture.
Here are the problems;
 High server maintenance cost
 Fixed role by Separation of client and server
 Exponential traffic increase as users increase
 Heavy Traffic to the agents and servers
 Lack of Scalability
For those reasons, Groove has to admit that it is suitable only for small group of people not for large-scale communities like OCEAN does.

Groove has five-layered architecture, Transceiver, shared spaces, tools, security, XML object Store and XML object routing.
Tool
Tool
Tool
Tool
Connection
Awarenes s
Tool Tool
XML Object Routing
Tool
Synchronization
Transparency
<Figure 2. Layered Architecture of Groove >
Groove has five-layered architecture;
1.
Transceiver layer – the highest layer where the user applications resides
2.
Shared Space layer – the session layer that users create
3.
Tool layer – the component layer that can be add and dropped by user and maintained by Groove agents
4.
Security layer – the layer for P2P security protocols, authentication, and authorization
5.
XML layer – the system layer that saves and routs XML objects

OCEAN Architecture
Distributed OCEAN & Application Software
Distributed Application Job Execution
Auction Negotiation Job Migration
Communication and Messaging System
Accounting
Node & JTRON Naming System
Off-the-shelf JVM & API
Centralized Accounting
Server
Accounting
Database
Off-the-shelf
DBMS
Off-the-shelf
Merchant
Accounting
System
It is easy to see the differences, because each system has totally different design goals.
However, the biggest difference is whether the accounting system exists or not. OCEAN is a virtual market place and it is critical to have secure and reliable accounting system. But Groove is just a virtual workspace that has no economic transactions.

Goal
Profitable to Peers
Backup Server
Distributed Auction
Job Migration
Accounting System
Groove Network
Virtual workspace
NO
Yes
NO
NO
No
No Portable to
Heterogeneous OS
Platform
Firewall Tunneling
Role exchange
(client/server)
Yes
No
OCEAN
Virtual Computing Resource Platform
Yes
NO
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Selling Idle Resources
Buying Idle Resources
No
NO
Yes
Yes
Monitoring Job Status
No Yes
Even though Groove is designed to provide a virtual workspace for users, it is still server-oriented application, which has servers and agents for controlling peer network. That is a biggest difference from OCEAN. OCEAN is fully distributed and peer-oriented application.
OCEAN doesn ’ t have a server for backing up customer activities. In OCEAN, there is no server but only peers.
 Groove Product Backgrounder, by Groove Network http://www.groove.net/pdf/groove_product_backgrounder.pdf


Introduction to Groove, by Groove Networks
Internet 3.0 by Ray Ozzie, https://www.bearstearns.com/supplychain/infrastructure.pdf
 OCEAN Functional Description, by Michael Frank http://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/ocean/OCEAN_Functional_Description.pdf
 OCEAN System Architecture by Michael Frank http://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/ocean/OCEAN_System_Architecture.pdf