AUTOMOTIVE

MetaCluster UC 3.0, built on a Service Oriented Architecture, embodies the latest generation of fine-grained virtualization technologies to enable dynamic data centers to provide preservation of service levels and infrastructure optimization on an application-agnostic basis, under all load conditions. Unlike course-grained virtual machine technologies which run at the operating system level and VM mobility technologies which can only move an entire virtual machine (often comprising multiple applications) at one time, MetaCluster runs in a middleware layer between the OS and the applications, and provides a container technology which surrounds each application, delivering both resource isolation and machine-to-machine mobility for applications and application processes. MetaCluster's application virtualization and container technology enables relocation of applications both across physical and virtual machines. MetaCluster also provides substantial business intelligence which enables enterprises to set thresholds and define rules for managing the relocation of applications and application processes from machine to machine, both to address high availability and utilization business cases. A recent survey conducted by Tier1 Research confirms enterprises are now more interested in second-generation application-layer virtualization technologies, which reside above the virtual machine layer, that focus on the goal of providing increased service level uptime and true optimization in the enterprise. "The utility computing vision aims to increase reliability and performance of runtime environments while delivering IT resources in an efficient on-demand model", says Andy Schroepfer, founder of Tier1 Research. "Our survey of enterprise CIOs and IT operations personnel indicate that improving availability and gaining access to performance on demand are the most important issues on their IT agenda and are driving utility computing adoption," he continued. "Most current virtualization products provide hardware or operating system level virtualization with performance overhead ranging from 10% - 30%, but these infrastructure-level solutions continue to be more targeted at optimizing test and development environments rather than maximizing availability and efficiency in the enterprise data center," said Jason Donahue, president and CEO of Meiosys. "MetaCluster UC 3.0 is all about enabling user-transparent machine-to-machine application mobility for business-critical applications in the enterprise data center, driven either by an event or policy-driven basis without service interruption," he added. Deploying MetaCluster UC 3.0 for business critical applications allows applications to be virtualized very efficiently so that the performance impact is unnoticeable (typically under 1%). Virtualized applications can then be moved to the infrastructure best suited from a resource optimization and quality of service standpoint. Server capacity can be reassigned dynamically to achieve high levels of utilization without compromising performance. Since MetaCluster UC 3.0 enables the state and context of the application to be preserved during relocation, the relocation is both fast and transparent to the users of the applications. Features and Benefits MetaCluster UC 3.0 is a critical component of the Services Oriented Architecture. The ability to statefully relocate applications enables enterprises to have: -- Non-interruptive system maintenance achievable without service down time -- Dynamic workload optimization and vertical scalability -- Predictive Failover -- Very fast provisioning and horizontal scalability of business critical applications such as ERP and CRM MetaCluster UC 3.0 includes the following features: -- Transparent checkpoint/restart for multi process, multi threaded, sequential and MPI-based applications -- Fine grained application virtualization that enables application to be decoupled from the underlying infrastructure and to be encapsulated in a lightweight, mobile application container -- Stateful application relocation (with full state, connections and context preserved) of applications under heavy load, both in J2EE and non-J2EE environments -- Complete management and intelligence layer to configure and trigger the relocations, including a comprehensive policy engine and web based GUI -- XML APIs allowing the easy integration of MetaCluster with network and system management packages such as IBM Tivoli and CA UniCenter -- Qualified support of several commercial enterprise applications such as Oracle, WebLogic and SunOne Application Server Availability MetaCluster UC 3.0 is supported on AMD, Intel 32 and 64 bit architectures, and run on Linux today. It will also be released in production on Solaris 8/SPARC in the first quarter of this 2005, and a port to Solaris 10 will follow. It is available now through Meiosys partnerships with major platform vendors and software companies.