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Cluster Resources, which developed the Moab unified automation software and opened for business in 2001, announced Aug. 5 that it is changing its name to Adaptive Computing and launching a new version of its product.
The company, which has tight partnerships with IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the HPC (high-performance computing) space, also said it is enlarging its market focus from HPC to enterprise IT.
Moab is intelligent automation software custom-designed for large high-performance computing systems. The company is using that technology as a basis for moving into new commercial areas that include the development of public and private cloud data centers.
Moab provides policy-based governance and enables systems to allocate and manage applications, optimize service levels and reduce operational costs.
The company currently manages 12 of the world’s 20 largest computing installations-including the Los Alamos National Labs Roadrunner and Oak Ridge National Labs Jaguar systems-among other data- and compute-intensive environments.
“These HPC systems require agile, intelligent workflow management and automation that can respond to changing business needs-the same requirements now needed within data center and cloud computing environments,” company President David Jackson, younger brother of founder and CEO Michael Jackson, told eWEEK.
“As organizations consolidate and virtualize resources and manage applications to optimize service levels and reduce operational costs, they will need more intelligent and effective tools and controls to do the job. That’s what Adaptive Computing is all about, and we think the new name better fits our purposes.”
The company claims that its new Moab Adaptive Computing Suite for data centers and private clouds, launched Aug. 5, is the only cross-platform, intelligent automation suite with features that support the consolidation and virtualization of critical IT resources.
This is despite the fact that little or no virtualization software is used in the HPC installations in which Moab usually runs. But Jackson and his Spanish Fork, Utah-based team of 60 developers say they have included all the necessary virtualization capabilities into their new product.
VMware Hypervisor vs. MoabVirtualization
What’s the difference, say, between VMware’s ESX hypervisor and Adaptive Computing’s Moab virtualization?
“VMware’s hypervisor is going to virtualize the low-end resources to make them changeable and movable,” Jackson said. “It’s not going to make the intelligent decisions as to what are the competing SLAs; it’s not going to make the management decisions to reach down and change the network to be able to set up a VLAN on the fly; it’s not going to reach over to storage and make an allocation, or reach into a license manager and make an allocation.
“Our product will fit at a higher level and orchestrate what happens within that VMware space, as well as in the Xen space, and help align them with business objectives,” Jackson said.
New features and capabilities include commercial data center application support and virtual machine management; the ability to adapt resources to respond to changing application and service requirements; and Web-based UI access for cloud-based environments.
The new features enable Moab to work as a virtual data center-level operating system whose underlying infrastructure behaves like a shared pool of resources, Jackson said.
The system takes a unified, holistic view of the entire data center and reconfigures systems and optimizes the allocation of application services according to organizational policies and required service levels. These capabilities allow data center and private cloud environments to maximize service levels and reduce overall IT costs.
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