MOVIES

TORONTO, -- Continuing its leadership in commercial Grid solutions, Platform Computing today announced the general availability of Platform Symphony(TM) 1.5, an application infrastructure solution designed to accelerate online and real-time distributed processing. With its high performance, Grid-enabled, service-oriented architecture, Platform Symphony helps companies move toward the real-time enterprise by speeding up time- sensitive and mission-critical applications faster and more accurately than ever before. Platform Symphony offers commercial institutions unprecedented scalability, improved performance, guaranteed service, and rapid deployment in a virtualized environment. Initially launched in the financial services market, Platform Symphony uses an open, extendable architecture that enables commercial institutions to integrate all distributed IT assets, creating a single, virtual environment. Through this virtual environment, institutions can transparently share applications across the enterprise, transforming a traditional 'siloed' compute environment to a shared, service-oriented model. Platform Symphony's virtualized infrastructure supports a variety of compute workloads, from online/real-time, or offline/batch, or job flows, and its dynamic and intelligent provisioning allocates applications, servers, workload, and data to address pending service demands, based on Service Level Agreements (SLAs), priority, workload volume and available resources. With Platform Symphony 1.5, commercial institutions across all industries can improve application performance 100-fold, dramatically reducing processing times from hours to minutes. This highly efficient and cost-effective solution is designed to help enterprises develop, run and manage Grid-enabled applications, and to accelerate results by dynamically and intelligently distributing and executing work in parallel, leveraging existing hardware resources and legacy applications. With Platform Symphony, larger volumes and increasingly complex problems can be handled using the increased capacity and hardware utilization. This ultimately increases business performance and reduces total cost of ownership. In the financial services industry, JPMorgan Chase is using Platform Symphony to manage selected, compute-intensive portions of the Investment Bank's application workload across its globally distributed technology infrastructure. In addition, several other global commercial institutions are deploying Platform Symphony on departmental and enterprise levels, allowing them to complete business critical analysis in hours instead of days. With its unique workload orchestration and service provisioning capabilities, Platform Symphony drives significant cost savings and productivity improvements by dynamically allocating and controlling the distribution of work, data and capacity across distributed, heterogeneous resources. Built on a foundation of more than 10 years of distributed computing experience, Platform Symphony has an open, customizable architecture to help organizations develop, run and manage virtualized environments. Key benefits of Platform Symphony 1.5 include: -- High Performance: Symphony is ideal for massively parallel applications with critical time and service quality constraints. With Symphony, a large computation can be divided into smaller parts (services) and run in parallel across distributed resources, which accelerates time to results. Its high performance messaging quickly and reliably transfers large volumes of data. Data caching eliminates redundant computations, minimizes time to access data, and increases the speed of data-intensive computations. -- Unprecedented Scalability: Symphony is the only solution that can be extended from the departmental level to the enterprise level, harnessing thousands of CPUs, and handling millions of jobs to help organizations realize the benefits of Grid computing and Web Services. -- Guaranteed Service: Symphony's dynamic and intelligent provisioning allocates applications, servers, workload, and data to address pending service demands, based on Service Level Agreements (SLAs), priority, workload volume and available resources. -- Fast, Easy Integration: To help commercial institutions Grid-enable applications quickly and easily, Platform Symphony integrates seamlessly with third-party, homegrown or commercial applications at either the binary level and source code level. Symphony integrates with infrastructures and components in C, C++, Java, J2EE, EJB, CORBA, IBM MQ, Tibco, .NET, DCOM, Python, Perl, TCL, VB, SOAP/XML, HTTP, and Web Services. "With Platform Symphony, commercial enterprises can manage more transactions and get faster results, but with fewer operational resources and at a lower cost," said Ian Baird, vice president, marketing and sales operations, Platform. "With Symphony as the next generation of computing infrastructure, enterprises and ISVs can easily build, manage, and run grid applications as they move to Grid Computing and Web Services technologies." Unlike P2P or desktop-scavenging based solutions, Platform Symphony is architected for server farm orchestration, which provides seamless integration with existing IT infrastructures. This fundamental technology differentiator delivers significant competitive advantages to services organizations that need to plan ahead for future growth and scalability. For more information about Platform Symphony visit www.platform.com/products/symphony/index.asp.