Grid Computing
3Tera continues to innovate cloud
(Aliso Viejo, CA — October 1, 2008)— 3Tera®, Inc., the leading innovator of cloud computing technology and utility computing services, announces beta availability of AppLogic™ 2.4 which includes support for virtual appliances running Microsoft® Windows Server™ incorporated in all infrastructure components necessary to run Web applications including storage, networking and load balancing. The new functionality is available immediately both as a service in the cloud and as private clouds in enterprise datacenters. For the first time, a cloud computing platform enables virtual datacenters that exceed the capabilities of traditional datacenters in commercial enterprise environments.
Complete Cloud Computing Solution
Adding Windows to AppLogic’s existing support of Linux, Sun’s Open Solaris™ and Solaris™ 10 follows 3Tera’s Cloudware™ architecture for open cloud computing, announced earlier this year. Users of AppLogic can now utilize the most popular datacenter operating systems in their applications, and even mix and match operating systems within applications as needed. This advance opens cloud computing to the ever growing number of users seeking IT scalability and flexibility beyond what is possible today in traditional datacenter environments.
“Windows support is an important requirement for an open cloud computing environment robust enough to take on any Web or enterprise application,” said Bert Armijo, senior vice president of sales and marketing, 3Tera Inc. “Solutions like .net, IIS, SQL Server and Exchange have made Windows a critical part of IT infrastructure.”
Cloud is becoming a more important concept in the enterprise and I wonder if we wont see this continue. The concept that I might buy in services, whether it’s ‘virtual capacity’ for my bcp virtual infrastructure, workload capacity for my hpc solutions or infrastructure for web farm development or to deal with short term business requirmenets. That 3Tera (amongst others) are continuing to innovate in this area is exciting and brings more empowerment and functionality to the consumer on demand has to be a good thing - exciting times are ahead!
DataSynapse and Green IT
LONDON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–DataSynapse, a leader in dynamic application service management, will be a featured presenter at the upcoming IDC Conference on Green IT in London on October 9, 2008. Dynamic application service management (DASM) has the potential to completely change the way we look at and manage IT costs and the environmental impact of energy usage in the datacentre. But how can you maximize the impact of DASM on your infrastructure and costs?
The DataSynapse presentation on October 9, 2008 entitled “Green IT and the Datacentre”, given by Fred Gedling, CTO, EMEA and SVP, DataSynapse, will address these questions and will cover:
How to transform the delivery of application services to ensure that service levels can be exceeded and business agility can be maximised, while minimising costs, through effective use of IT assets.
The adoption of innovative approaches to optimising key green datacentre IT metrics.
The delivery of sustainable business value by transforming IT service delivery to suit 21st century computing demands, while minimising capital and operating expenditure and the environmental impact of the datacentre.
This sounds interesting, it will be interesting to see what DataSynapse have to say in terms of Green IT, how using your existing infrastructure efficiently can improve your application performance as well as reduce the need to buy more infrastructure, be more energy efficient. I’ll need to check it out, I wonder if there will be a podcast/content on their site?
Labelling the data center to allocate workload
Survey: Datacenter Complexity a Key IT Challenge
One of the top challenges in aligning IT with business objectives
IT operations management solutions provider Avocent says enterprises continue to be perplexed by the increasing complexity of datacenters, which remains one of the top challenges in aligning IT with business objectives.
Avocent today revealed results of an independent survey that showed companies are seeking better visibility into their data center operations. The spring 2008 survey was conducted for Avocent by Actionable Research and polled 299 executives and IT managers in the U.S. in manufacturing, high technology, retail, banking, health care, education and government.
Survey respondents said that energy conservation was the most difficult issue to resolve with their current tools. Managing the total cost of power was the second most difficult task, and many respondents noted that their interest and work with virtualization technology were influenced by the hope of ultimate energy savings.
Being able to understand your IT infrastructure, your data center is key to how you use this capacity, these technologies to aid in achieving business goals, whether it’s granting more capacity to the equitites teams or what the availability of space is for infrastructure to bring online that new business requirement. As the data center becomes the IT, as we continue to abstract application from infrastructure, this is set to become even more so. Understanding data centers, even tiering them in terms of resilience and performance, to allow us to allocate workload to the data center that best meets their platform specification/availability or cost requirements. We use Mumbai for the high availability, Scotland for low cost 9-5 applications and New York for the overnight batch runs.
Optimization of the platform with Oracle
An overflow crowd of 400-plus people at an Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) OpenWorld Executive Solution session at Moscone Center in San Francisco today heard Jörg Tettenborn, director of the Oracle Strategic Alliance for Fujitsu Siemens Computers, describe how to create a lean and agile IT infrastructure by virtualizing and consolidating Oracle Application Server and Database applications with FlexFrame for Oracle (FF4O).
As Tettenborn described, FF4O leverages the grid computing capability of Oracle 10g to create the first dynamic IT solution for Oracle application and database services, which can result in a reduction of operating costs by up to 60% and a rapid improvement in efficiency when it comes to running business-critical applications.
FlexFrame for Oracle is a joint development of Oracle and Fujitsu Siemens Computers, and follows the example of another hardware, software, and services product that Fujitsu Siemens released in 2002, FlexFrame for SAP, that dynamically assigns servers to SAP applications on demand. Tettenborn explained that Fujitsu’s concept of Dynamic Data Center and Oracle’s Grid Computing both share an architecture that separates servers from data and separates servers from applications. In a Grid Computing environment, IT components such as applications, storage, and processors are dynamically allocated (provisioned) and freed again to serve other requests when they’re not being used. He said key technologies for both Dynamic Data Center and Grid Computing include virtualization, dynamic provisioning, and automation, that is, integrated administration and management where, for all practical purposes, the grid or dynamic data center can manage itself.
This article illustrates how using the right range of hardware, software and infrastructure, you can achieve a lot more from your infrastructure. As we consolidate and optimize the infrastructure for the application, we need to also examine optimizing the application for the infrastructure, targetting both at the same time is going to achieve the best set of results in terms of reliability and performance.
Talking about grid and cloud
Is vCloud the answer to “Does IT Matter”
Whilst I was in the USA for VMworld I purchased all of the books I had added to my Amazon wish list. Shipping costs to Australia are not cheap, compared to within the states anyways.
One of the books I had on the list was “Does IT Matter” by Nicholas G. Carr. It is an interesting book which works through the idea of how much actual competitive advantage IT investment brings to a company.
I wonder how long it will be before we see the concept of cloud or grid computing becoming the underlying infrastructure? How long will it take before we switch from the olden days way of provisioning a server and loading the application, to provisioing a virtual machine and loading the application; to loading the application and allocating resource, disk, cpu and memory. As we take this to the next level, could we see a move of the web infrastructure from a per business unit, per application or per web server basis, to a web farm that scales with the demand. To an infrastructure that we can scale up and down? As more of the applications move to grid, web or Citrix type applications, how do we charge for workload, how do we manage the need to provide service with the business’ willingness to pay. Will this mean a shift from everything being 24/7 or 24/5 to being available, but scaled up as demand requires it?
Grid is the next enabler for your business
LISLE, Ill., Aug 12, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Grid.org, the online community for open-source cluster and grid software, announced today that their open source cluster software stack, UniCluster, has exceeded 5,000 downloads by the HPC community.
Grid.org, launched in November 2007, was developed to provide a single aggregation point for information and interaction by the community of grid and cluster users, developers and administrators. Home to Univa UD’s UniCluster software stack, Grid.org offers an all-inclusive destination for users to exchange information, ideas, and participate in development projects.
The more open source solutions that come online for grid/hpc solutions, the more we can communicate the benefits of the platform and empower end users to benefit from the technology. Grid.org seem to be doing well, it would be great to see what solutions have been developed from their software. I’ll need to take a look.
Cloud computing an enabler to your business?
(VMWorld 2008 – Las Vegas, NV – September 15, 2008) – 3Tera, Inc., the leading innovator of cloud computing technology and utility computing services, announced today a partnership with Citrix Systems, Inc. to make enterprise grade cloud computing solutions available to customers of all sizes in external hosted clouds, or as a platform that can be deployed in corporate data centers behind customer firewalls. By combining the new Citrix Cloud Center™ (C3) solution with 3Tera’s award winning AppLogic™ Cloud Computing Platform, the companies are elevating the benefits of virtualization to a new level – from physical servers and virtual machines to entire virtual data centers and applications running in the cloud. The initial focus of the collaboration between the companies will center on the new Citrix® XenServer™ Cloud Edition, a key component of the Citrix C3 product family. XenServer Cloud Edition offers the full benefits of the proven Xen-based virtualization technology enhanced with advanced cloud infrastructure capabilities specifically defined by 3Tera. 3Tera will also embed XenServer Cloud Edition in future versions of its AppLogic Cloud Computing platform.
“With the introduction of Citrix Cloud Center (C3), Citrix offers a solution to manage the information technology infrastructure of next generation data centers,” said AJ Jennings, vice president of business development, Citrix Systems. “We carefully chose 3Tera to be one of our first strategic partners for C3 because of their deep experience offering a full and open cloud computing platform for running multi-tier applications in a massively scalable global cloud.”
“As cloud computing moves from early adopters to mainstream users, new customers are demanding enterprise levels of reliability, support and control. Our Cloudware architecture allows us to work with Citrix to incorporate commercial, industrial strength virtualization into AppLogic,” said Barry X Lynn, Chairman and CEO, 3Tera. “Adding XenServer Cloud Edition to our application packaging technology, global cloud presence, and disaster recovery appliances creates the first open cloud computing platform ready for mission critical applications.”
Benefits for Customers
Cloud computing is dramatically changing the way applications will be developed, delivered and deployed by everyone from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses and startups. The Citrix / 3Tera partnership adds industrial strength virtualization to an already massively scalable platform. The resulting benefits are particularly important to the enterprise.
• Reinforcing its industry leadership, Citrix is working with 3Tera to add powerful capabilities for data center scalability, management and portability to offer enterprise customers secure, easy to use virtual infrastructure services scalable on demand with remote management through a browser.
• Offering an OS agnostic platform for cloud computing solutions and virtualized data centers leveraging 3Tera’s support for all major server operating systems, Linux, Solaris and Windows.
• The proven leadership of Citrix in virtualization helps make AppLogic an even more dependable platform on which multiple operating system components can operate in the same applications.
Any movement towards cloud computing for the end user has to be a good thing, being able to leverage the infrastructure/service you need on demand can be the difference between meeting those project goals, of earning revenue and not. I’ll need to read up more about this announcement. We already use cloud for bladewatch and it’s great.
Grid is the thing?
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 5 — Next Generation Data Center 2008 — DataSynapse, Inc., a world leader in dynamic application service management software for the next-generation datacenter, today announced the results of a market survey that cited high performance computing edging out virtualization as the most important IT initiative over the next 12 months. The survey, conducted through an independent third-party with 100 senior IT executives spanning financial services, communications & media and the public sector, surprisingly ranked green IT initiatives as last.
Other findings include integration with existing architecture as the biggest challenge related to cloud computing, citing scalability as the second biggest obstacle. The survey also revealed that 91 percent of respondents cited four key areas that would be the most helpful with their IT processes: the ability to tie business metrics to services; policy-driven server provisioning capabilities; dashboards and real-time reporting; and the ability to dynamically scale applications to meet peak service levels.
It will be interesting to see if the adoption of grid is integrated or parallel with virtualization of the infrastructure? Am I right in thinking that server virtualization is the first step, then the server, the storage and then the application convergence from both sides IT and the business?
Grid and the Hadron Collider
A network of around 80,000 computers worldwide is being readied for a deluge of data when the Large Hadron Collider starts up, marking a new phase in the use of the web.
The machine will slam subatomic particles called protons together to recreate conditions not seen since an eyeblink after the Big Bang of creation and explore new realms of nature, including finding the Higgs particle that plays a starring role in current theory, holding it together, and helping to endow matter with mass.
I was reading the Telegraph this morning today and found this article about the Hadron Collider which is set to be powered on Wednesday and is using grid technology to help with the data analysis. It’s always interesting to read how the technology is being used, do check it out.
DataSynapse to improve virtual management
NEW YORK, Jul 30, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — DataSynapse, Inc., a world leader in dynamic application service management software for the next-generation data center, today announced that it is working with VMWare, the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the data center, to provide customers with simplified deployment and operational management of application platforms and services to facilitate always on, always responsive virtualized applications.
As a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program, DataSynapse plans to integrate its FabricServer(R) dynamic application service management software specifically with VMware VirtualCenter, which enables administrators to provision, monitor and manage their virtual data centers through a single console. This integration will allow IT organizations to automate deployment and provisioning and optimize service levels of server applications in a virtualized infrastructure, helping them to reduce capital and operating costs while delivering order of magnitude improvement in time to market for critical business applications.
Integrating DataSynapse technologies with VMWare could bring a powerful combination of virtualization of the application and the infrastructure. It will be great to read how the tools can be leveraged to improve system administration in terms of provisioning and management. It might also therefore be something that your system administrators could manaage, if they’re already looking after the grid, having them manage elements of the FabricServer might be an ideal solution.
in my company we have had huge problems outsourcing, all the departments we have outsourced are now suffering and we ...
Hello everyone ! Can anyone tell me what is the estimated value of this green datacenter complex ? And when ...
Yes, outsourcing can bring challenges to us, especially for the owners. Even before there are lots of challenges in outsourcing. 
Internet protection is a must for business security and data integrity. Electronic Banking 
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I always use `hponcfg -g` from the commandline of the Linux server. 
Martin, It's great to see that you have picked up this article, many articles report large numbers and tempting savings ...
If you have problems, email me and I'll send you a few config scripts.