Adaptive Updates Moab to Automate, Manage Cloud 
Adaptive Computing is optimizing its Moab unified intelligent management and automation technology for datacenters to help deliver high availability, SLAs and intelligent end-to-end automation to public and private clouds.
This spring, Adaptive Computing is taking a page from its long-standing HPC (high-performance computing) playbook and bringing its proven technologies and best practices for enterprise datacenters to the world of cloud computing.
Specifically, Adaptive is shipping an upgrade to its Moab intelligent management and automation suite tuned for usage by private and public clouds, as well as its first Web 2.0 based portal / console, dubbed Moab Viewpoint.
These latest Moab offerings will help PaaS and IaaS companies provide enterprise-caliber cloud solutions that better ensure SLAs, policy compliance and real-time visibility, Adaptive Computing’s COO Michael Jackson told Integration Developer News. They are based on the company’s well-established Moab Adaptive Computing Suite, originally designed to infuse intelligent automation into data center and HPC [high-performance computing] environments,
“The challenge of automating management cloud infrastructures remains an enormous challenge, even for corporations with large budgets," said Michael Jackson, president and COO of Adaptive Computing told IDN. "With Moab 5.4, companies will [move] cloud environments from static, semi-automated environments to corporate-capable, workload-driven clouds.”
How Moab’s Upgrades Will
Help Launch ‘Adaptive Clouds’
Adaptive’s Moab infuses policy-based governance into datacenters and HPC infrastructures, allowing customers to consolidate and virtualize resources, allocate and manage applications, optimize service levels and reduce operational costs.
Adaptive’s just-released technologies extend Moab’s capabilities into the cloud infrastructures, providing cloud customers more control and automation options by treating the cloud’s resources as a virtual shared resource pool, Jackson explained to IDN. “This approach lets cloud providers and users put resources where most needed based on workflow, policy and SLA requirements,” he said.
Architecturally speaking, Moab 5.4 provides a unifying ‘virtual OS,” which enables Moab to monitor, manage, control and automate a large pool of diverse resources. Moab’s automation capabilities are designed to immediately respond to changing workload requirements, enforce service-level agreements (SLAs), and enable on-demand provisioning.
"Building on our [HPC] capabilities, Adaptive provides the tools to allow a private or integrated hybrid cloud into a mission-critical, dynamic infrastructure, which can adjust to available resources, as well as to a specific company’s SLAs, governance and policy issues" Jackson said. Moab provides “intelligent scheduling” capabilities to match workloads to available resources, optimizing resource efficiencies without overloading resources, he added.
The Moab Adaptive Computing Suite 5.4 provides:
- Enhanced virtual private cloud (VPC) management for on-demand response to requirements (throttle up or down);
- Cut memory requirement by 80% with use of improved memory-efficient algorithms, which help manage much larger IaaS environments;
- Consolidation of all popular virtualization environments (VMware, KVM and Xen); and
- Provides “live monitoring” of resources to eliminate bottlenecks across CPU, memory, I/O and network resources.
Further, for visibility and more granular management, Adaptive is shipping Moab Viewpoint 1.0, a customizable Web 2.0 self-service portal UI to let users create, monitor and manage their virtual private cloud (on or off premise). Moab Viewpoint 1.0 lets admins:
- Create and manage virtual private clouds, adding and removing resources;
- Add services to a shopping cart;
- Archive and restore VPC content;
- Monitor server state and troubled resources;
- Manage physical and virtual servers.
HPC Tools, Heritage at Work
For Enterprise Caliber Clouds
Under the covers, Moab’s “intelligence engine” automates the collection of information from all resources in the shared (and mixed) computing environment. Then, Moab applies business policies, orchestrates, adapts, and optimizes the unified environment with workload optimization in real-time. This helps companies balance the needs to achieve SLAs and QoS at the lowest costs, responding to resource availability and enforcing policies.
These latest updates, Adaptive’s Jackson said, build on a long-standing track record of delivering mission-critical benefits to datacenters and HPC deployments, which include capabilities that allow companies to:
- Consolidate and eliminate redundant and underutilized hardware,
- Drive ability to use commodity middleware
- Increase energy efficiency and savings (through automated de-activation during low workloads).
- Provide policy-based governance and intelligent automation
Moab is now working in many of the world’s largest datacenters and HPCs, Jackson told IDN, providing “agile, intelligent workflow management,” along with automation that can respond to ever-changing business needs.
Moab also supports multiple heterogeneous environments with translation facilities which can use various interfaces to take actions and manage across all different resources in the environment – all while maintaining end-to-end orchestration or compliance with a unified set of business rules.
One analyst sees that cloud providers could gain a lot from HPC / datacenter providers such as Adaptive. “Visionary companies are applying best practices from resource-intensive supercomputing facilities to their data center and cloud deployments," Joe Zhou, senior analyst at Ideas International, said in a statement. “Data center-wide virtualization and workload management can help to maximize the return on investments in infrastructure, applications and personnel."
