Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

High-performance computing specialist Cluster Resources is following the money with software and a re-branding that targets cloud fluffers.

The company is today expected to announce it's extended its Moab intelligence engine for managing HPC systems to packaged software and systems such as web servers and virtual machines, and to support billing.

Founded in 2001 specifically to tackle the HPC market, and with 1,500 customers including 12 of the World's top 20 super computers, Cluster Resources is also today expected to announce it's changed its name to Adaptive Computing.

Adaptive president Michael Jackson told The Reg half of the old Cluster Resources' revenue had shifted from traditional HPC to clouds and the data centers that underpin them.

The new software and name are designed to help focus on this emerging market. Jackson believes the experiences of customers from the world of heavily customized HPC software and systems of building, consolidating and provisioning data centers are about to be encountered in the mainstream world of government and commerce.

The tricky thing for these organizations is scaling and shrinking the computing resources underpinning web sites and services in anticipation of, or response to, public demand.

Jackson said the combination of its Moab intelligence engine with extensions to off-the-shelf software and technologies will help these organizations.

He promised customers would save money by not buying additional hardware and through reduced power consumption on servers within a month. Price starts start at $285 per socket each year.

Also, Moab provides provisioning and workflow management at a meta level so it works with existing management systems like Hewlett-Packard's OpenView and IBM's Tivoli, rather than customers having to replace their existing software. IBM is already a user of Moab.

"They [existing systems management frameworks] don't do workload, resource and policy aware decision making," Jackson said. "They don't make the meta-level decisions of how the environment should be managed - they are domain specific. Our environment helps to unify behavior."

The intelligence engine has been wrapped into the Moab Adaptive Computing Suite, which has been extended to transactional workloads, web services and virtual machine instances. The suite can manage provisioning and virtual managers, dynamically interface with the network and storage layer to allocate virtual private networks for security or storage on the fly. Also added is a portal Jackson said connects to customers' billing systems, to allocate and charge for computing resources. ®

Agentless Backup is Not a Myth