VMworld Signage - "Are You Cloud Intense?"

VMworld always attracts some interesting booth strategies and signage.  We were highlighted as being one of the most innovative with our "Are you Cloud Intense?" theme on our shirts and booth imagery.

Show Your Cloud Intensity

I'm not sure we are philosophers, but we definitely know how to help customers build private clouds with IaaS management software!

The Release of Platform HPC 3.0.1 Dell Edition

Last week, Platform HPC 3.0.1 Dell Edition was released. One of the significant features of this release is the support of high availability for management nodes on the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1. Why is support for management node HA special when many cluster management tools support it already?

Well, Platform HPC is not just a cluster management solution. It is an end-to-end cluster management and productivity tool. When handling management node failover, Platform HPC not only needs to ensure all the cluster management functionalities can fail over, it also has to ensure other functionalities fail over at the same time so that the end user and administrator won’t see the difference before and after the failover. The functionalities that failover handles include but are not limited to:

1. Provisioning
2. Monitoring & alerting
3. Workload management service
4. Web portal for users and administrators

In a heavy production environment, the failover function of the user web portal is far more critical than the failover of the cluster management functionality. This ensures users have non-stop access to the cluster through the web portal even if the primary management node running the web server is down.

Other capabilities included in Platform HPC 3.0.1 Dell Edition include:

1. Dell hardware specific setup for management through IPMI
2. One-To-Many BIOS configuration via the idrac-bios-tool
3. Dell OpenManage integration
4. Mellanox OFED 1.5.3-1 kit
5. CUDA 4 kit
6. Management software integration provided by QLogic and Terascale
7. Dell fully automated factory install

With the complete and integration software components, the cluster solution that Platform Computing delivers together with Dell has gone a long way since the release of Open Cluster Stack in 2007.

Platform MapReduce v1.5 brings enhanced functionalities to MapReduce runtime

 

We are pleased to announce that Platform Computing 1.5 is now available.  Compared to its predecessor, Platform MapReduce v1.0 released in late June, the newly released version brings a number of enhancements in the key functionalities the product delivers.  Major improvements include the availability of the MapReduce application adapter technology, which allows users to execute their existing Hadoop applications without changing the code or recompile. Enhancements have also been made to the runtime layer so that mixed workloads can run on a same cluster simultaneously.  In addition, the support of IBM GPFS in the data layer is perhaps the most compelling capability in this release because it delivers a powerful solution to users running Hadoop applications on GPFS instead of a designated file system.

For more on Platform MapReduce 1.5, please see:  http://info.platform.com/rs/platform/images/Datasheet_PlatformMapReduce.pdf

So what does it all boil down to? Well, there are a number of immediate benefits with the new version:  

• The support of mixed workloads running on the same cluster simultaneously improves resource utilization and drives shared services model for IT, therefore multiple business lines can share the same infrastructure and a centralized IT management
• Increased developer productivities and choices. With the application adapter technology offered in Platform MapReduce 1.5, developers can build their applications using their preferred MapReduce programming framework and run their code without making changes to the code or recompile, thus  accelerating  the application development cycle while eliminating vendor lock-in.
• The integration of IBM GPFS and Platform MapReduce 1.5 allows users to run MapReduce applications directly on the data stored in GPFS instead of moving the data to a designated file system before the application execution, which can be a very costly operation.  In addition, the combined technologies deliver the best of both worlds to users running MapReduce applications.
• The unique capability of supporting different data input from output in Platform MapReduce 1.5 provides a more efficient approach to the ETL function as it eliminates the requirements for data staging at output, which can be a time consuming and expensive operation.

The past couple of months have been busy and exciting for us at Platform. We are seeing increased interest in the key functionalities offered in Platform MapReduce 1.5.  As Hadoop / MapReduce continue to gain market traction, users will become more educated on these emerging technologies and many will begin to move their MapReduce applications from labs to true production environments.  We believe Platform MapReduce will play a critical role in this transition by delivering a reliable, efficient and proven solution to users running MapReduce in production. 

Best of VMworld Award for Private Cloud Management

One of the fun elements at VMworld is participating in the “Best of VMworld” awards.  Platform Computing entered the Private Cloud Management category against 15+ vendors.  After several web meetings, live demos and reference reviews, we were awarded the Finalist position.  

Best of VMworld 2011 Private Cloud

This award follows other recent successes such as being named the #1 private cloud vendor by Forrester Research.  Customers want a trusted vendor that has proven themselves in large-scale, enterprise environments, and one that has been around for a few years.  Companies just don't want to trust their data centers to a startup with an uncertain future.  There is just too much at-risk.   

Platform team celebrates the win at VMworld!

Our private cloud / IaaS management solution, called Platform ISF, was cited for the following key differentiators:

• Cloud in a cloud in a cloud – ability to support multiple hierarchical organizational structures with nested virtual private clouds for business units, groups, projects, etc.
• Physical deployment – includes native capability to do bare metal physical provisioning all the way to complex multi-tier application structures
• Application-centric framework – IT services are captured as standardized applications or application components that are multi-tiered, virtual and physical, private and public cloud, etc.
• Automated provisioning of VMware – deep integration that maintains investment in VMware with automatic discovery, import (all or partial), synchronization, and simplification of provisioning VMware environments
• Multi-hypervisor with KVM and Xen – adds a management layer similar to vCenter on top of KVM / Xen to normalize capabilities across hypervisors
• Integration with P2V (physical to virtual) – support for multiple provisioning tools plus a Platform native option to support the ongoing transition of more applications and workloads to virtual environments
• Managing resource pools on DRS clusters – adding control over resource pools on DRS clusters with end user self-service management aligned to hierarchical account management
• Policy management - depth and breadth of policy management capabilities for both initial placement and operational service level agreements (SLAs) such as flexing up and down
• One solution – Platform ISF is an integrated set of IaaS management capabilities that span self-service, billing, automation, etc. versus requiring multiple solutions from different vendors that require stitching together

Which of these are important in your environment?

Top 5 VMworld 2011 Takeaways for Private Cloud

4 days.  115 degrees outside.  20,000 of my closest virtualization friends.  VMworld Las Vegas was quite an experience.  The Platform Computing booth was busy from start to finish with a demo of our award-winning Platform ISF private cloud (IaaS) management solution.  

From attending the keynotes and speaking with attendees, I had 5 key takeaways from the event:

1.       Private cloud is at a tipping point

Gone are the days of having to start every conversation by explaining the difference between virtualization and private cloud.  Of course this is a self-selected group but the education level has dramatically increased.  We had many people stopping by to discuss their private cloud initiatives and how to get started.

2.       VMware licensing has upset many

The new vSphere 5 licensing has caused many companies to reevaluate their dependency on VMware.  The recent price increases had disrupted their planning and created additional fears about being locked in to a costly hypervisor (vCloud = vLockIn).  VMware management tools manage VMware ESXi hypervisor--and that's it.  There is a real fear of being locked into a specific stack and/or being required to upgrade to more expensive packages with lots of unnecessary functionality.

3.       Multi-hypervisor is real

Even before the price increase, users have been evaluating a mixed hypervisor strategy.  A common discussion is VMware’s closed support at the management layers.  VMware is viewed as the gold standard when considering virtualizing production applications.  End users already have or are seriously considering adding KVM (Platform is a member of the Open Virtualization Alliance) and to a lesser extend Xen into their roadmaps for non-production use cases (for example dev and test).  These offer great density at lower cost.

4.       The rise of application-centric thinking

In the early days of private clouds, most of the focus was on the transient IT services such as an OS or VM.  Typical end users were developers needing access to standardized IT environments.  Most of our conversations included discussions about additional levels of an application stack – including the middleware, application logic, and post-provisioning scripting.  In summary, an application-centric private cloud.  By standardizing IT service definitions to include these levels and automating delivery, companies can effectively define their own PaaS.  While we position Platform ISF primarily as IaaS management, many of our customers think we are selling the solution short.  Customers are using it to define and provision their own PaaS and SaaS applications.  Ironically this was a major focus of VMware’s messaging, albeit in a hosted PaaS environment.  Most of our larger enterprise customers want to tightly integrate their on-premise data center infrastructure and security systems into an on-premise personalized PaaS. 

5.       Physical is part of cloud

When one thinks cloud, the natural mental model = virtualization.  However, I was surprised by the number of conversations where end users want to add integrated physical provisioning.  Sometimes the focus was for standalone bare metal provisioning.  But as we move more towards an application-framework, there are components in the app stack such as the database server that might only exist on a physical system for scalability and performance.  Operating within this mixed environment is a core requirement to deal with both non-production transient IT services as well as production apps with flexing and stringent service level agreements (SLA).

At Platform Computing, we are not cloud washing our products.  On top of being named the #1 vendor by Forrester, we received the Best of VMworld Finalist award for Private Cloud Management.

Were you there?  What were your takeaways?