SCIENCE

Forms R&D team to integrate OpenStack solutions with premium hardware and benchmark OpenStack performance in extreme scale deployments

Grid Dynamics has announced that it has joined the OpenStack open source software community and formed a strategic R&D team to work on OpenStack initiatives. This group will focus on integrating OpenStack’s compute and storage orchestration solutions with premium hardware and high-end enterprise systems and benchmarking the performance of OpenStack solutions in extreme use cases involving very large-scale deployments.

Grid Dynamics delivers application infrastructure solutions to make large-scale mission-critical business systems scalable and elastic for large enterprises like Cisco, Macys.com, eBay, and ING. The company is also a leader in cloud computing, having deployed the first application to Amazon EC2 cloud in 2007.

“While cloud orchestration solutions such as OpenStack address the all-important problem of dynamic resource scaling, these systems are still in the early days of market adoption,” explained Victoria Livschitz, CEO of Grid Dynamics. “Most cloud orchestration solutions still have gaps hindering faster adoption by large enterprises.  We plan to leverage our experience in developing enterprise-grade, elastic application infrastructures to bridge these gaps. “

There are three specific areas where Grid Dynamics is focusing its efforts for OpenStack:  

Network orchestration: Historically, most cloud orchestration engines have focused on compute and storage orchestration, with comparatively smaller advances in the area of network orchestration. At the same time, being able to dynamically provision and configure network resources is key to deploying not just individual compute nodes and storage, but whole environments that comply with enterprise SLAs. Grid Dynamics’ experience building solutions for networking leaders such as Cisco, coupled with its understanding of extreme enterprise use cases in financial services and ecommerce, will be instrumental to advancing OpenStack in that direction.

Support for premium hardware and enterprise systems:  Another gap in most cloud orchestration engines is the level of integration with enterprise workflow management. Enterprise IT organizations typically face a large number of configuration policy discrepancies requiring daily resolution to stay compliant with change control processes. The lack of integration between cloud orchestration and workflow management translates to manual remediation every time, which, in turn reduces IT department productivity. Integration of OpenStack with enterprise workflow management solutions such as BMC Atrium is another priority for Grid Dynamics.   

Predictable behavior in large-scale deployments:  Cloud orchestration systems have not typically been exposed to large-scale deployments, although there are some notable exceptions. Most systems tend to perform well when provisioning 1-20 nodes and some limited storage. However, provisioning hundreds of nodes simultaneously with complex network and storage configurations frequently poses challenges and results in errors. Building highly available systems for large-scale deployments has been a strength of Grid Dynamics since the company began in 2006. It will become an important area of research and contributions in working with the OpenStack community.

“At Grid Dynamics, we’ve always contributed to the open source community, such as our recent open source solution, Grid4Search, that integrates Oracle Coherence with Apache Lucene. We see a lot of alignment between what we do with our customers on a daily basis and the direction in which OpenStack is headed. By leveraging OpenStack to solve concrete customer problems, we can provide benefits to both customers and the community,” continued Livschitz.