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December 5, 2011

Platform Beefs Up Big Data Cloud Management

Datanami Staff

Platform Computing, which has recently been ushered into the IBM fold, announced today that their cluster, grid and cloud management software, Platform ISF got an update—one that might enhance its appeal for private cloud customers with data-heavy workloads.

While the company has gained a steady stream of academic customers over its 18-year history, many of its news items recently have had a definite enterprise and business intelligence slant—more specifically, bringing cluster management out of the dark corners of system administration and into the limelight. For instance, the release of ISF 3.0 today includes a cleaner UI and “a self-service portal aimed at easing cloud administration for IT and line of business managers.”

The concept behind Platform’s offering, as with its others, is to create “intelligent” management systems that harness policies and allocate resources according to those in the most efficient yet performance-aware manner possible. This focus has, of course, been extended into the release of 3.0. As Platform Computing stated today, “based on intelligence ISF gathers while running both applications and the underlying infrastructure, the product is able to automatically match resources to business needs and scale deployed services up or down accordingly.”

The release of Platform ISF 3.0 brings the company’s Cloud Application Designer, which lets users create via drag and drop reusable templates that can simplify deploying business applications in the cloud. The addition of the Cloud Application Designer means that users can define and build out IaaS and PaaS and creates application-aware service deployment in addition to the overarching task of managing runtime policies.

According to Platform, considering ISF 3.0 is necessary if there are problems with inflexible physical and virtual silos, low utilization, and issues with matching an application’s resource requirements that slows down. This describes quite accurately some of the challenges that were cited by administrators we spoke with at SC11 in November who are dealing with big data demands at a number of organizations.

We spent time talking with the CEO of Platform Computing, Songnian Zhou at the Supercomputing Conference and will be posting a video and more details on that when we’re back in full swing after the holidays. Zhou comments on the big data driver behind Platform’s business and how it is further shaping its approach to cluster, cloud and grid management.

For those attending the Gartner Data Center Conference in Vegas, Platform will be on hand to demonstrate the updated ISF at its booth.

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