Tool Girds Grid for Enterprise

Playing off its success with delivering high-performance computing environments, Platform this week will detail an attempt to take its grid expertise into enterprise IT.

"IT folks have been looking over the wall at the HPC folks to see how the grid is working in that environment, and they want the same for the enterprise," said Robert Shecterle, vice president of product management at Platform Computing Inc., in Markham, Ontario.

Platform will introduce its Platform Enterprise Grid Orchestrator at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. Schecterle called EGO "the first and only grid platform that will deliver the power of virtualization, automation and sharing of all IT resources to every enterprise application type."

EGO allows an enterprise to tap its underused computing resources and maximize performance, Shecterle said. EGO employs an agent on each server to orchestrate the sharing of resources, he said.

"Were also building an SDK [software development kit], and were moving from supporting just the HPC market to all of enterprise IT," Shecterle said. "The SDK is being offered for free for people to build to."

The first product to be delivered on the EGO platform will be Platform VM Orchestrator, an automated policy-driven virtual environment manager that is designed to improve virtual machine availability, Shecterle said. The product will also deliver features for auto-provisioning and balancing and control of resources, as well as support for multiple VM containers. The product will be available in the fall.

Read more here about the growth of grid computing in the enterprise.

Carl Claunch, an analyst at Gartner Inc., in Stamford, Conn., said that with the increasing use of virtualization tools, data center operators must choose "tools that integrate, coordinate or administer the growing chaos."

Platform also announced a new version of its Linux clustering solution, Platform Rocks 4.0. It is based on the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure open-source Rocks implementation built at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Platform Rocks 4.0 features Red Hat Inc.s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 support; it also adds support for Silicon Graphics Inc. hardware to that already provided for Dell Inc. hardware. Platform announced an expanded relationship with SGI as well.

In addition, Platform is announcing a relationship with Cognos Inc. to bring grid technology to business intelligence applications. Platform will announce that it has officially joined the Cognos Technology Partner Program.

"Grid computing is the future of enterprise computing, helping organizations more cost-effectively use limited computer resources to solve problems that traditionally would have required an enormous amount of computing power," said Don Campbell, vice president of product innovation and technology for Cognos, in Ottawa.

Platforms Shecterle said his company is hoping to exploit its ecosystem to promote its grid strategy. "Were a $60 million company. We cant do it all ourselves," he said. Platform is looking to its partners, such as IBM, Dell and Novell Inc., for help, Schecterle said.

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