HPC in the Cloud: Adaptive's Moab Enhancements Beckon to Wall Street

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April 20, 2010

Adaptive's Moab Enhancements Beckon to Wall Street

Adaptive Computing Pads Private Clouds for the Financial Services Sector with Moab 5.4 and Viewpoint 1.0 Release

Nicole Hemsoth, Managing Editor, HPC in the Cloud

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Adaptive Computing, creator of the widely-employed cluster of Moab technologies, which includes Moab Adaptive HPC Suite (along with similar suites for cluster and grid environments), just announced two interconnected pieces of Moab news targeting the vast infrastructural and resource management needs of the financial services industry.

The release of Moab 5.4 coupled with the new component brand, Moab Viewpoint 1.0, will allow end users on the commercial enterprise side -- specifically financial services -- the enhanced ability to get out from the heavy hardware and complex software demands of daily operation and make a smooth transition into the world of private clouds. The dual launch produces the "automated delivery of IaaS and Paas based on application workloads," according to the company's news release yesterday morning.

White Spaces in Private Clouds for Financial Services

While its work in the HPC sphere is similar in function to what the company announced, the capability of the newest version of Moab has been greatly expanded in hopes that the relatively small company can experience greater recognition from Wall Street. The release of Moab 5.4 adds a host of enhancements to the existing version that will be important to Adaptive Computing's ideal end user base -- the financial services sector.

Aside from being the center of worldwide economic activity, of course, there are other contributing factors to Adaptive's decision to bring private clouds to financial services, not the least of which is the need for these enterprises to consolidate and effectively manage increasingly costly resources. Resource management is often cited as one of the missing pieces in effective business strategy in the cloud -- whether in a public, private or hybrid space -- and few firms offer comprehensive and automatic processes for monitoring, provisioning and supporting this critical aspect in a large-scale, data-intensive environment.

According to Peter ffoulkes, vice president of marketing at Adaptive Computing, this emphasis on the financial services is certainly not random. ffoulkes states,

"Financial markets do both HPC and commercial work and tend to be at the leading edge of creating new architectures. Also, due to the economic meltdown and mergers, they're all under a lot of pressure to get everything in order to deliver new services fast and competitively. A lot of our enhancements were driven by this sector, but we should also note that there are others with similar needs, including the oil and gas industry, and the telecommunications sector. There's a large spread of markets, but financial services is at the leading edge of innovation, of moving beyond IaaS into true workload-driven cloud platform as a service."

While ffoulkes states that the financial services industry could benefit from the expanded host of offerings for commercial enterprises in the newly-released 5.4 version, the emphasis on continuous innovation and the complex needs and scale of their data operations makes this market the ideal candidate. Adaptive Computing's range of technologies seem suitable for industries with similarly complex workflow operations, provisioning issues, and other demands of a mission-critical enterprise, including the oil and gas industry as well as telecommunications enterprises.

Direct Details on Moab 5.4 Enhancements for Commercial Enterprise

Given the scope of the announcement, which was actually a double-sided release about Moab 5.4 and Moab Viewpoint 1.0, it seemed best to allow ffoulkes to do the talking about core enhancements. In an interview shortly before the full release of the announcement, he stated:

We've been working on what we think of Cloud 2.0. It's a workload-driven cloud, which is the underpinnings of what HPC is doing, even if it's not recognized. It's corporate-capable workload-driven cloud. We've built in the robust support of these dynamic transactional workflows that don't happen in the HPC sphere and robust support for virtualized environments (VMware, for instance).

We've got all of this functionality and with the waxing and waning of commercial enterprise, but as services slow down and you start changing things and everything comes to an end, suddenly you have virtual machines standing still everywhere with spare capacity. If you've got hundreds or thousands of servers as a human being, you simply cannot monitor all of them -- but automated software like Moab can. By monitoring through the nervous system influences you get from xCAT or the HP tools for instance, we can look at it and say, there is a lot of inefficiency so let's pack and consolidate these virtual machines onto a single server using live migration (if the underlying technology like VMware supports it) or until a process is finished which means we can pack things down and reprovision -- or, if they don't need it at all -- we can power those systems down and bring them back to life later when they're needed either with the same, different or a mix of personas and can save energy.

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