On SD Times, Platform
Computing brings HPC to cloud management, By David Worthington
High-performance
computing management software maker Platform Computing has developed a new
solution that pulls together physical and virtual IT resources to create and
manage private clouds.
On Monday, the company released a beta of Platform ISF, an
infrastructure-sharing platform for serving up Java EE application environments
inside the firewall from virtual resources, clusters and grids. Its general
availability is planned for fall 2009.
ISF is comprised of Platform's resource sharing technology and its virtual
machine orchestrator. ISF is designed to be technology-agnostic, supporting
multiple operating systems and virtual machine hypervisors, said CEO Songnian
Zhou.
"Platform ISF's key strengths are how it leverages Platform's High
Performance Computing technologies, in particular, its virtual machine
orchestrator and its EGO resource sharing technology," said ZapThink
managing partner Jason Bloomberg.
"One interesting feature of ISF is that it's billed as 'governance
neutral'—that is, it will support various choices for cloud governance. The
challenges organizations will face, therefore, will be ensuring that their
governance is in order before they make the move to Platform ISF."
Application environments are delivered according to workload and
resource-scheduling policies. The platform allows business users self-service,
he said.
"Users request resources and run applications on those resources.
Administrators have the ability to manage both resources and service offerings,
and the policies on which they allocate resources," explained Zhou.
"It is a way to provide more economic governance out to users as they
share resources, and provide more policy and usage governance on the way
resources are being used."
The platform taps into application metadata to select the underlying computing
resources that are required to support it, he said. He added that ISF is also
resource-aware, with an understanding of network topology, classes of servers,
and energy requirements.
Many development and QA teams are "hugging machines" due to
availability problems, and "silos drive down utilization rates whether
they are virtualized or not," Zhou observed.
"Faster access to resources and driving up utilization rates across
resources are the two key value propositions we are hearing from beta
customers," he said.
Cloud computing is here. Running applications on
machines in an Internet-accessible data center can bring plenty of advantages.
Yet wherever they run, applications are built on some kind of platform. For
on-premises applications, this platform usually includes an operating system,
some way to store data, and perhaps more. Applications running in the cloud
need a similar foundation. The goal of Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide
this. Part of the larger Azure Services Platform, Windows Azure is a platform
for running Windows applications and storing data in the cloud.
Cloud Computing is a style of computing in which
dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service
over the Internet. To deploy a new solution, most of your time and energy is
spent on defining the right infrastructure, hardware and software, to put
together to create that solution, Cloud computing allows people to share
resources to solve new problems. Cloud Computing users can avoid capital
expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a
provider only for what they use.
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