News

Appistry: ‘Real-time grid capabilities’ bring really good results

• By Jason Turcotte
• June 26, 2006

Appistry’s New Workload Management offers features it says bring real-time capabilities to grid computing though the company’s Enterprise Application Fabric. The additions enhance apps for three workload management policies and virtualize commodity hardware into a single system.

EAF’s supported policies include an exclusive execution policy, a persistent execution policy and a limited execution policy. The new functions afford enterprises deploying time-critical, CPU and data-intensive apps increased scalability and cost-cutting benefits. And with those policies, the app fabric software allocates resources to apps built in C/C++, Java or .NET.

Scalability, cost savings, time savings and “the ease of management” were perks that led Bill Evans, director of process technology, Partners Consulting, to Appistry’s EAF software. The Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based group, which offers full staffing and professional IT consulting services, just embarked on its first EAF app late last year. They plan to invest in the latest version of EAF and deploy the “integration center” for other clients.

“We were faced with the choice of using a third party product, Appistry or coding ourselves,” Evans said. “One of the real appealing features was the actual price point relative to the nature of the application and the client.”

Evans also says EAF has cut app time for this particular client (in the heavy manufacturing sector) by 50 percent. Though, they have yet to go live with the implementation.

“Our customers come to us because they need to deploy, scale and manage the most computationally demanding business and engineering applications created by today’s highly competitive ‘real-time’ environments,” said Kevin Haar, president and CEO, Appistry. “Our new workload management capabilities help us deliver … in one easy-to-deploy software product, providing all the benefits of high-end, ‘real-time’ computing, at an affordable price point.”

And analysts say the benefits of grid apps are bountiful.

“The motivations for using a grid to create a more powerful, larger, single virtual system, or to produce a less expensive alternative of the same size as the systems it is replacing, are powerful factors that compel many organizations to look at possible grid solutions,” says Carl Claunch, research vice president, Gartner. “The ability to create a virtual supercomputer that is faster than the largest traditional design opens the door for sizeable long-term rewards.”

EAF developers say their grid software functions uniquely because it is a “real-time” grid; its app fabrics support large-scale apps, virtualizes hardware into a single system and its fault-tolerant architecture rather than relying on heterogeneous resources. The newest Appistry EAF, with workload management, is available now for Intel and AMD servers running the Microsoft or Linux systems.