Adaptive Computing Eyes Wall Street Clouds

Automation is a key driver in the growth of cloud computing. So it's not surprising that a long-time player in IT automation is focusing on the market for private clouds. Adaptive Computing today announced upgrades to its Moab software, which is used to manage and automate the largest supercomputer and data center environments.

The latest improvements to Moab and a companion product, Moab Viewpoint, are designed for use by financial services firms looking to implement internal "private clouds."

Adaptive Computing, which until last year was known as Cluster Resources, has historically specialized in high performance computing (HPC) but has recently worked to reposition its products for a broader audience of data center operators. Moab manages virtualized resources for cluster, grid and utility computing environments, and currently runs in 12 of the world’s 20 largest computing installations.

Targeting Financial Sector
The company sees Wall Street as the next frontier for its products, and internal clouds as the best entry point into the market. Adaptive Computing says its Moab 5.4 and ViewPoint 1.0 releases can make it easier for companies to create and run applications in customized Infrastructure as Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments.

"While consolidation and virtualization have had a significant impact on driving down IT infrastructure costs, the challenge of automating the management cloud infrastructures comprised of multiple operating systems and virtual environments, and a variety of flavors of x86 servers remains an enormous challenge for even corporations with large budgets," said Michael Jackson, president and COO of Adaptive Computing.

"With Moab 5.4, companies will see the evolution of cloud environments from static, semi-automated environments to corporate-capable, workload driven clouds that move both the capability and economics of IT to the next level," Jackson added.

'Energy Aware' VM Management
Specifically, the Moab Services Manager has been enhanced with IBM’s xCAT provisioning software to simultaneously support multiple heterogeneous virtual machine (VM) environments including VMware, KVM, and Xen. This can allow customers to use Moab's automation to implement "energy-aware consolidation" of virtual machines, grouping VMs in service tiers based on their service level agreements (SLAs).

This allows users to create and manage groups of resources so the underlying hardware  can be powered down to save energy, which is of special interest to Wall Street trading firms with large numbers of servers dedicated to trading, which are idle after the close of trading. (See Wall Street's Cloudy Opportunity for more on this topic).

Adaptive Computing says it has also reduced the memory needed to run Moab by 80 percent compared with earlier versions, allowing a single instance of Moab to manage much larger IaaS environments.