Morphlabs eases way for companies to build private cloud infrastructures, partners with Zend

Morphlabs, a provider of enterprise cloud architecture platforms, has simplified the process of building and managing an internal cloud for enterprise environments -- enabling companies to create their own private cloud infrastructure.

The Manhattan Beach, Calif. company today announced a significant upgrade to its flagship product, mCloud Controller. The enhanced version introduces Enterprise Cloud Architecture (ECA), a new approach that provides enterprises with immediate access to the building blocks and binding components of a fault tolerant, elastic, and highly automated platform.

Morphlabs also announced a partnership with Zend Technologies Ltd., whose Zend Server will be shipped as part of the mCloud Enterprise, said Winston Damarillo, CEO at Morphlabs.

mCloud Controller is a comprehensive cloud computing platform, delivered as an appliance or virtual appliance, as well as providing open mCloud APIs (you can manage the ECA cloud from an iPad, for example). To support the leading platforms, mCloud Controller will have built-in ECA compliant support for Java, Ruby on Rails, and PHP.

Fittingly for enterprise private clouds, the Morph offering also provides direct integration to mainstream middleware via standards-based connectors. It also supports a plethora of VMs, from KVM to Xen, and and VMware, and allows for others cluster managers to be used as well.

Look for Morphlabs to seek to sell to both service providers and enterprises for the compatible hybrids benefits. Of course, we're hearing the same from Citrix, VMware, Novell, HP, etc. It's a horse race out there for a de facto hybrid cloud standard, all right.

Productivity gains

“PHP has been broadly adopted for the productivity gains it brings to Web application development, and because it can provide the massive scalability that e-commerce, social networking and media sites require,” said Matt Elson, vice president of business development at Zend. “Integrating Zend Server into Morphlabs’ mCloud Controller enables IT organizations to leverage the elasticity of cloud computing and automate the process of deploying highly reliable PHP applications in the cloud.”

Key features of the mCloud Controller with ECA include:

• Uniform environments from development to production to help users simplify system configuration. Applications can grow as needed, while maintaining a standardized infrastructure for ease of growth and replacement.
  
  
• Simplified system administration with automated monitoring and self-healing out of the box to avoid complicated system tuning. mCloud Controller also comes with graphical tools for viewing system-wide performance.
  
  
• Self-service resource provisioning, which frees the IT department from numerous application provisioning requests. Without any system administration skills, authorized users can start and stop computes and provision applications as needed. Billing is also included within the system.
  
  
• Streamlined application management automates the process of deploying, monitoring and backing-up applications. Users do not have to deal with configuration files and server settings.

The mCloud Controller v2.5 is available now in the United States, Japan and South East Asia. For more information contact Morphlabs at info@mor.ph.

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HP Business Service Automation portfolio gives IT the tools it needs to compete with clouds

HP is pushing the automation card again with new tools for hybrid IT environments. The company today announced “enhanced automation solutions” that set the stage for lower-cost business application deployment -- whether those apps are deployed traditionally, virtually or via a cloud.

HP’s latest Business Service Automation (BSA) enhancements beef up its solutions for hybrid IT environments, which the company defines as any combination of on-premise, off-premise, physical and virtual scenarios, including cloud computing. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP has identified a strong need in the enterprise, which is why it’s moving so fast on the BSA front. Although hybrid IT environments can increase a business’s agility and speed time to market, they also increase complexity, risk and costs by creating IT silos -- if the environment isn’t holistically managed. HP’s new BSA software enhancements work to take the “if” out of the equation.

A 360-degree hybrid solution

Today’s BSA announcement builds on HP’s recent cloud announcements for hybrid IT environments. The just-announced software enhances the HP’s BSA portfolio to offer unified server, network, storage, and application management. The goal is to break down IT silos to simplify application development and hybrid IT management.

HP is promising financial returns for companies that adopt its solutions. According to a June 2010 ExpertROI Spotlight conducted by IDC on behalf of HP, organizations that deploy HP BSA solutions can realize up to $4.82 in benefits for every IT dollar invested, reduce annual IT costs by up to $24,000 per 100 end users, and reduce outsourcing costs by 40 percent to 80 percent.

Organizations are seeking solutions that deliver business applications and services with greater agility, speed and at the lowest cost to the enterprise, regardless of their IT environment.

“Organizations are seeking solutions that deliver business applications and services with greater agility, speed and at the lowest cost to the enterprise, regardless of their IT environment,” says Erik Frieberg, vice president of Marketing, Software and Solutions at HP. “Clients can achieve up to 382 percent ROI by deploying HP’s leading automation software and leverage the benefits of new hybrid delivery models.”

HP’s acquisition of Stratavia has strengthened its automation portfolio by adding deployment, configuration and management solutions for enterprise databases, middleware and packaged applications. These solutions aim to bridge the gap between application development and operational teams. With Stratavia’s technology in its portfolio, HP said it can now provision all of the components, rapidly deploy changes and manage the ongoing configuration and compliance management.

Under the BSA hood

HP’s BSA portfolio now offers new capabilities in application deployment and risk mitigation, as well as better efficiency and productivity. For example, HP Server Automation 9.0 helps clients automate the entire server life cycle, control virtualization sprawl, and provide more flexible provisioning and deployment of applications. New Application Deployment Manager (ADM) functionality lets IT organizations automate the release process to bridge the gap between development, quality assurance and operations teams. HP said these enhancements can accelerate application deployment by up to 86 percent.

What’s more, HP Network Automation 9.0 now helps clients contain costs, mitigate risk and improve efficiency of the network by automating error-prone tasks, reducing outages and enforcing policies in real-time regardless of the environment. And HP Operations Orchestration 9.0 helps clients faced with constant alerts and siloed teams improve service quality across hybrid environments. It gives clients the ability to automate the IT processes required to support cloud computing initiatives.

HP Operations Orchestration software can help manage a hybrid infrastructure through a single view while HP Client Automation 7.8 helps clients reduce administration costs for managing physical and virtual machines through a single tool. And HP Storage Essentials 6.3 helps clients reduce complexity in hybrid environments, while improving storage utilization and controlling capacity growth.

IT needs to play at productivity better

The BSA offerings come at a crossroads for enterprise IT. The fact is that IT can no longer just compete against its own past practices and cost structures. There's a looming gulf between what IT costs the IT department to provide and what a small army of outside hosts is coming to market with. IT now needs to compete against the costs structures of pure-play cloud and SaaS providers and hosts.

The solution for IT to remain competitive, and to pick and choose what to retain and what to outsource, is to make all of its systems and apps perform better and more efficiently. And it also needs the governance and management to automate those apps and systems to keep complexity and costs in line.

Visibility, automation and management are essential for IT to stay in the game against hosts, MSPs, clouds, SaaS providers, etc. And the same management allows IT to function as the best broker of services, regardless of where the servers reside. This is clearly the target HP's BSA portfolio has in its sights.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

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Aster Data's newest offering provides row and column functionality for big data MPP analytics

Aster Data has taken big data management and analytics to the next level with the announcement today of its Aster Data nCluster 4.6, which includes a column data store and provides a universal SQL-MapReduce analytic framework on a hybrid row and column massively parallel processing (MPP) database management system (DBMS).

The San Carlos, Calif. company's new offering will allow users to choose the data format best suited to their needs and benefit from the power of Aster Data’s SQL-MapReduce analytic capabilities, as well as Aster Data’s suite of 1000+ MapReduce-ready analytic functions. [Disclosure: Aster Data is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Row stores traditionally have been optimized for look-up style queries, while column stores are traditionally optimized for scan-style queries. Providing both a row store and a column store within nCluster and delivering a unified SQL-MapReduce framework across both stores enables both query types.

Universal query framework

For example, a retailer using historical customer purchases to derive customer behavior indicators may store each customer purchase in a row store to ease retrieval of any individual customer order. This is a look-up style query. This same retailer can see a 5-15x performance improvement by using a column store to provide access to the data for a scan-style query, such as the number of purchases completed per brand or category of product. The Aster Data platform now supports both query types with natively optimized stores and a universal query framework.

Other features include:

• Choice of storage, implemented per-table partition, which provides customers flexible performance optimization based on analytical workloads.
  
  
• Such services as dynamic workload management, fault tolerance, Online Precision Scaling on commodity hardware, compression, indexing, automatic partitioning, SQL-MapReduce, SQL constructs, and cross-storage queries, among others.
  
  
• New statistical functions popular in decision analysis, operations research, and quality management including decision trees and histograms.

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Pulse surges for Eclipse with more than one million developers on board

Getting developers on board. That’s the challenge technologies from Linux to Android face every day. Genuitec has helped Eclipse overcome this challenge with Pulse. Indeed, more than one million developers around the world have now installed Pulse.

Pulse works to give software developers an efficient way to locate, install and manage their Eclipse-based tool suite, among other tools. The software essentially empowers developers to customize their installs while avoiding plug-in management issues -- even when crossing operating systems. [Disclosure: Genuitec is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“When we envisioned Pulse in 2007, we knew the developer community badly needed an easy technology to help manage their Eclipse tools,” says Maher Masri, president and CEO of Genuitec, a founding and strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation. “Now with one million users, we can happily say Pulse is a great success story.”

The Pulse advantage

One of the advantages Pulse is pushing out to its one million developers is the ability to manage four years of Eclipse platform technologies from a single dashboard, including Eclipse 3.0, also known as Helios.

Pulse, like many other powerful Eclipse-based technologies, continues to attract world-class developers to the Eclipse platform

That’s no small feat, seeing how many enterprises standardize on older Eclipse versions, yet still demand an easy migration path to upgrade their projects, technical artifacts, and other mission-critical subsystems. Developers can even access Eclipse 3.7, also known as Indigo, as the milestones are rolled out in coming months.

This multi-year tool stack feature is part of the reason why Pulse has attracted so many Eclipse developers. Pulse is the only product on the market that supports this type of lifecycle-based stack management.

Getting to know Pulse

Pulse also provides a product family of offerings. There’s a Community Edition that’s free, a Managed Team Edition that aims at the needs of development teams, and a Private Label software delivery version designed for corporate use. Pulse Community Edition is free for individual developers, while Pulse Managed Team Edition is $60 annually. Pricing for Pulse Private Label, a software delivery and management platform, is based on individual requirements.

“Pulse, like many other powerful Eclipse-based technologies, continues to attract world-class developers to the Eclipse platform,” says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “As we continuously enhance our code base and march toward Eclipse 3.7 next summer, we’re pleased that Genuitec will continue to support developers using Eclipse with its Pulse management software.”

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

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Delphix Server launches at DEMO to slash relational database redundant copies, storage waste and cost

Delphix has brought virtualization techniques to database infrastructure with general availability of Delphix Server, which reduces structured and relational data redundancy while maintaining full functionality and performance -- and operating in a fraction of the space at lower cost.

The Palo Alto, Calif. company, just launching this week at DEMO, says that Delphix Server solves two major IT challenges: the operational complexity and redundant infrastructure required to support applications lifecycles via multiple database caches. Delphix software installs on standard x86 servers or in virtual machines, allowing customers to virtualize database infrastructure into a "single virtual authority" and do for relational data what storage innovations and "de-dupe" have done to reduce myriad standing copies of data caches.

The interface for managing the data is very clean and time-line based down to seconds. It reminds me of an enterprise-level version of Apple's Mac OS X Time Machine, but far more granular. This allows all those with access to the data to manage it intelligently but sparingly.

While Delphix consolidates storage and reduces database provisioning and refresh times, it adds little or no impact to production systems through its innovative synchronization technology, says Jed Yueh, CEO at Delphix. Other benefits include:

• Agile application development: Delphix automates the provisioning and refresh process, enabling developers to instantly create personal sandboxes or virtual databases (VDBs) that are up-to-date and isolated from other VDBs. Developers can cut months out of project schedules and perform destructive or parallel testing to improve overall application quality and performance.

• Improved data resiliency: Patent-pending TimeFlow technology enables customers to create a running record of database changes; VDBs can be instantly provisioned from multiple points-in-time, with granularity down to the second. This time-shifting capability enables businesses to dramatically reduce the time required to recover from logical data loss.

• Storage consolidation: The average customer creates seven copies of each production database for development, testing, QA, staging, operational reporting, pilots, and training, with each copy typically having its own dedicated and largely redundant storage. Delphix creates a single virtual environment, where multiple VDBs can be instantly provisioned or refreshed from a shared footprint -- coordinating changes and differences in the background without compromising functionality or performance.

Both enterprises and service providers for SaaS and cloud will benefit from reducing the vast data redundancy across the app dev and ops lifecycle. By shrinking the hardware requirements, those hosts seeking to improve their margins gain, while enterprises and ISVs can devote the server and storage resources to more productive uses.

I should think that the app dev and test folks would grok the benefits too. Why not cut the hardware and storage costs for bringing applications to maturity by virtualizing the databases? What works for the OS and runtime works for the data.

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