ACADEMIA

Platform Computing today announced Platform Enterprise Grid Orchestrator (EGO), the first and only grid platform that delivers the power of virtualization, automation and sharing of all IT resources to any enterprise application. Platform EGO leverages under-utilized computing resources to maximize application performance, reduce capital equipment purchases and extend existing technology investments. Platform EGO uses a single common agent on each server to orchestrate the sharing of resources specific to business and technical challenges that enterprise IT organizations face. The introduction of Platform EGO represents a paradigm shift in the grid computing market, with enterprises now able to build a unified framework for grid-enabled applications that allocates resources and responds to business needs in real time - allowing them to fully realize the benefits of utility, adaptive, and on-demand computing environments. "The market for traditional grid computing faces an impending disruption as enterprises look to move to virtual environments and fully leverage their hardware and software assets," said Vernon Turner, Group Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Computing, IDC. "When making this transition, enterprises need solutions with broad compatibility and the intelligence to manage and allocate resources where and when they're needed. In realizing the full potential of service oriented infrastructures (SOI) and service oriented architectures (SOA) you need a layer in between to ensure diverse IT resources come together seamlessly - Platform EGO has the opportunity to become this layer." Platform EGO was created to allow enterprises to: -- Realize sustainable competitive advantage through the optimization of mission critical applications and processes -- Lower the total cost of Enterprise IT through improved utilization of resources and reduced operating expense -- Leverage the benefits of commercial grid computing to realize the full potential of web services, SOA and virtualization -- Provide a single, unified management environment for all hardware node-level operating systems and infrastructure software -- Enable any applications, services and workloads to access shared hardware, data, and services through advanced policy-based resource allocation and execution -- Embrace an open, secure, standards-based infrastructure to leverage existing technology investments and easily integrate with a broad range of hardware and software -- Easily integrate grid technology into any enterprise application through a simple to use, standards-based tool kit With the release of Platform EGO, the power of commercial grid computing has been extended to all areas of Enterprise IT. Leading technology providers share a common vision with Platform to realize the benefits of enterprise grid technology. "As Grid gains adoption in commercial enterprises, it is essential for IT vendors to deliver open grid solutions that can integrate easily with other grid technologies in a heterogeneous, distributed environment," said Ken King, VP Grid Computing at IBM, "IBM has built a strong partner network with vendors that share this common vision. Platform Computing is one of those partners and we are pleased with the direction of the announcements they are making today". Platform has embraced the independent software vendor (ISV) community with the launch of Platform EGO, and will publish a free standards-based toolkit to ensure seamless applications integration. This integration will allow enterprises to fully leverage their grid infrastructure as they move towards a service-oriented architecture. "With Platform EGO, we believe Platform has articulated a compelling vision for Grid Computing that will satisfy the requirements of enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) customers" said Andy Diggelmann, Vice President, Strategy & Planning for SAS. "Platform and SAS have a history as strategic partners, and we are looking forward to expanding our relationship and leveraging this new technology for the benefit of our customers. More data and less time are two constant issues that businesses are facing, and grid computing efficiently meets the scalability and performance challenges by enabling the delivery of information at the right time for better, and faster, decision making." "The history of IT evolution has seen a growth from small, contained computing environments to the large, heterogeneous distributed enterprises of today," said Songnian Zhou, Chief Executive Officer, Platform Computing. "This growth has created an opportunity for the creation and delivery of an enterprise grid platform that is customizable and extensible, to support next-generation applications and fulfill an organization's IT resource needs. Drawing on Platform's legacy in grid and distributed computing, and our work with industry-leading customers and partners, we have developed Platform EGO to meet this opportunity and realize of the next stage of IT evolution." With a vast installed base of Fortune 2000 customers, Platform LSF and Symphony are two of the most recognized and trusted brands in grid computing. Platform EGO leverages the core technology of Platform LSF and Symphony, enabling customers to extend the benefits of their high performance computing (HPC) environments across the enterprise. Future versions of Platform LSF and Symphony will be based on Platform EGO technology. The first product to be delivered on the Platform EGO technology is the Platform VM Orchestrator, an automated, policy-driven virtual environment manager for greater simplification of an IT infrastructure, resource optimization and risk reduction to deliver the highest quality of service available (see accompanying press release "Platform Computing Ushers in the Next Generation of Virtual Machine Environment management for Enterprises").