03/25/2008

Elastra announced the availability of the ELASTRA Cloud Server – a product that enables the launching of clustered database application systems in on-demand computing environments.

ebizQ received the following:

“ELASTRA has made faster and more manageable what is normally a complex process of deploying and managing clustered, scalable relational databases, and they’ve allowed us to derive significantly more business benefit from cloud computing systems. ELASTRA has enabled our team to focus on our core business goals and application innovation,” said Noah Parsons, chief operating officer, Palo Alto Software. “ELASTRA gives our company the scalability required to accommodate bursts in our computing demand without having to waste money and over-provision our data center resources. Additionally, ELASTRA’s meter-based pricing allows us to pay only for what we use, freeing our capital for other company-differentiating investments and projects. As ELASTRA continues to develop its solution to include additional industry-standard application components, we plan to expand our use of their cutting-edge technology to provide us with a strong competitive edge.”

The ELASTRA CLOUD SERVER is a server-side design and run-time application for public and private cloud computing environments. The design functionality provides configuration-based system specifications describing what a complete application system is designed to do and how that design is to be implemented. The run-time functionality takes the design as an input, connects to the cloud computing platform, allocates the appropriate virtualized hardware resources, and installs the specified database and infrastructure software, as well as the instrumentation, metering and automated management software that enables that entire system to be scalable and maintainable. After a system is deployed, the ELASTRA CLOUD SERVER monitors, manages, and enables dynamic scalability of the running applications. With this offering, ELASTRA is introducing two markup languages: one for specifying system design (ECML) and another for specifying system deployments (EDML). These languages are first steps in setting standards for moving virtualization beyond virtual machines and towards virtualizing entire application systems and streamlining the design, deploy, build, and manage process for compute clouds.

“The big impetus for building ELASTRA CLOUD SERVER was the realization that if hardware has really become something software can manipulate, our customers can now have applications that they design be deployed, scaled, and managed by software processes that connect to compute clouds which provide a pool of virtual hardware resources. We wanted to pick up where utility computing left off – to go beyond the VM and toward virtualizing complex applications that span many machines and networks,” said Kirill Sheynkman, president & chief executive officer, ELASTRA Corporation.

“Virtualized hardware alone is not enough for companies to realize the true value of the cloud. A managed, automated way to architect, deploy, scale and maintain software which supports applications in virtualized environments is needed, along with infrastructure software that enables organizations to actually use the cloud to its fullest potential. This software should follow the same utility-based service model that the underlying virtualized hardware ascribes to,” said Lydia Leong, research director, Gartner. “With these enhancements, cloud computing is set to fundamentally improve how businesses of all sizes build and deploy applications and consume infrastructure, both software and hardware.”