Red Bull Racing Grabs Top Two Spots at Monaco Grand Prix

A big congratulations to Platform customer Red Bull Racing for taking first and second place honors at the Monaco Grand Prix race on Sunday! For those of you out there that aren’t familiar with Formula One racing, the Monaco Grand Prix is the granddaddy race on the Formula One circuit, so we’re joining our friends at Red Bull in popping the champagne corks with the two winning drivers, Mark Webber and Sebastien Vettel.

Both favored to win the top spots, Webber, who took first place honors in the race, is the first Australian to win the Monaco Grand Prix since Jack Braham in 1959. Only 0.4 seconds behind was Red Bull teammate Vettel. Webber’s victory now places him at the top of Formula One standings at this point in the racing season.


Platform has a longstanding relationship with Red Bull that allows their engineering team to perform high powered design and simulation application processing to help improve the performance of their Formula One cars. Of course, we’d like to think that it wasn’t just fantastic driving that led to Sunday’s Grand Prix win!

Congrats again to the entire Red Bull team and to Mark Webber and Sebastien Vettel—we’re raising our glasses along with you and hope the rest of the racing season brings even more wins for Red Bull Racing. Check out the pictures below for some of the racing action!For more on Red Bull Racing and Platform see Tom Zsolt’s blog from earlier this year or our customer case study and video.



It’s all about CHOICE

Everyone in the tech industry has an opinion about cloud computing these days. More often than not, those opinions come not from the IT people in the trenches who are looking at implementing private clouds, but from industry pundits or vendors that are trying to tell them what they want.


That’s why it was refreshing to see Steven Burke’s article this week where he interviewed actual IT people attending EMC World in Boston about what they are looking for when it comes to private clouds.


In a word, they want CHOICE.


Both IT execs interviewed in the article made it clear that what they need from cloud providers is to be able to offer their users a service—and they’re determined not to be tied to one provider for those services. What they want is a solution that will perform with what they already have and make what they have perform better. As one exec said, “I am not worried about what the chassis is or what the processors are.”


What else do they need? To prove ROI. If they’re choosing your service, you’re going to need to prove that you can deliver—or they may look elsewhere. Again, choice.


They also understand that moving to a service model for IT is going to take time—they know that building a private cloud and transitioning users to a service model is going to take years and what they need won’t come in a box or a plug-and-play solution. As we’re fond of saying around here, “Clouds are built, not bought.”


IT is not going to be in the hands of vendors forever... what choices will you provide your users?


Vote for Me and Platform at VM World 2010!!

VM World 2010 kicks off August 30 in San Francisco, and this year the conference is seeking “the wisdom of crowds” to set the agenda. The public gets to vote on which speakers they’d like to see, and yours truly - Platform’s CTO for HPC - is in the running with a session that will explore several paths that organizations can take to successfully support a private cloud. In what should prove to be a lively and informative discussion, I will demonstrate how enterprises can effectively match performance and reliability requirements to their computing workload, while mitigating some of the challenges and risks involved (such as security and control issues). Perhaps most illuminating, I’ll show how some of the real-world companies that Platform is working with are forging a path to the private cloud today, with each use case illustrating a unique approach. So if you’re interested in hearing more, please give me a big thumbs up at: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/. My session is being considered for the Private Cloud - Management track, and my session is listed towards the very bottom of the scroll list.

Voting is open until May 26, so please encourage your friends, colleagues, neighbors, partners, and customers to vote frequently and often so that I can see you all in San Francisco this August!

Fetch Technologies Leading the Way with Private Cloud

This week, Platform Computing announced a new customer for ISF, our private cloud management software. Fetch Technologies, an artificial intelligence-based data extraction company, is an excellent example of what cloud computing can do for your business. As a company with a small IT staff, a large-scale SaaS offering and clients that rely on their mission-critical data, Fetch needed to find a cost-effective way to scale and meet the increasing compute power requirements needed for their complex data extraction. Fetch’s story, as told in this excellent article from Nicole Hemsoth at HPC in the Cloud, also exemplifies a trend we are seeing with many of our customers and prospects- the desire to start with private cloud and eventually leverage public cloud resources. Nicole and Rich Parker from Fetch sum it up nicely here:


“It is useful for firms to have the ability to leverage the public cloud as needed. In a discussion about private clouds in the model that Fetch is utilizing, ‘private cloud monitoring of resources and capacity planning are very critical. We need to know when we need to add more resources and how long it will take to add them. For example, we need to add more CPU and memory—that could take us 2 weeks to do. We monitor like crazy; we have over 200 monitors.’ However, as Parker did note, having the capability to scale to EC2—even if that never happens, is one of the attractive features of a cloud offering that the one they chose from Platform.”


To learn more, take a look at Nicole’s article. Rich and his team are true innovators on the cloud front, and are definitely ones to keep an eye on as they evolve their cloud computing model.