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| |  |  | | Orchestrating I.T. for Business Bill McColl
Founder and CTO, Sychron Inc.
San Mateo, CA As the economy rebounds, it is becoming clear that the next massive megatrend in enterprise computing is going to be “Orchestrated IT” – the architecting and deployment of automated, dynamic IT infrastructures that second by second, minute by minute, are always exactly aligned with the rapidly changing business priorities and requirements within a real-time enterprise, always delivering exactly the right IT resources to each application and service as demand on each of those fluctuates rapidly and unpredictably over time. Over the past few years, a wide range of basic enabling technologies for Orchestrated IT have been developed and deployed within data centers. The list includes tools and technologies for operating system virtualization, application installation and configuration, server provisioning, workflow coordination, application monitoring, session migration, load balancing, single-server resource fencing, root cause analysis, grid scheduling. This patchwork of manual and (semi-) automated sensor and effector tools is now being integrated and supercharged by the release of the first products designed to leverage, integrate and enhance these point solutions into an intelligent and automated command-and-control system for the real-time data center. This new breed of “policy-driven infrastructure orchestrator” product is referred to as a “Fabric Operating System” by Forrester, Gartner calls it as a “Service Governor”. Irrespective of the name used, what everyone agrees on is that it is a core element for any on-demand infrastructure strategy. In this talk we will explain the critical functionality that an infrastructure orchestrator provides in on-demand computing, and how early adopters are using this technology today.
| | |  | | www.Sychron.com | | | About Sychron Intense demands are being made on today’s IT organizations to become more adaptive to ever changing business priorities, and yet more efficient in managing capital costs and leveraging technology initiatives.
Utility and On Demand computing initiatives provide an architectural vision to create adaptive infrastructures; however practical, deployable solutions remain on the horizon.
Sychron was founded in 1998 with the mission to allow IT organizations to transform their current hardware and software resources into a truly organic infrastructure – an infrastructure where resources are fully leveraged, highly responsive, and instantly adaptable to changing business requirements.
Sychron has developed the industry’s first real time infrastructure orchestration solution to drive the dynamic interaction of infrastructure operations management hardware and software so that multi-vendor environments can deliver the right computing power to the right applications at the right time.
Bringing together the key ingredients required to orchestrate your infrastructure into a truly adaptive IT environment – one that responds in real time to changing demands and business imperatives – Sychron enables IT organizations to exponentially increase server utilization rates, and increase the quality of application delivery, all while substantially reducing the infrastructure costs required to deliver quality service. "Practical Yet Powerful" Solution
At the core of the Sychron architecture is a massively scalable, real time policy engine that includes a real time, fault tolerant distributed data cache and extensible policy language. Sychron’s infrastructure orchestration solution creates a closed loop flow of information that aggregates and virtualizes changing resource state information over a wide range of ‘sensor’ technologies such as utilization monitors, application performance monitors and other systems resource management and monitoring facilities. Based on ever changing sensor variables, priority and criteria based policy conditions initiate and schedule a global set of actions across data center ‘effector’ technologies, such as load balancers, auto-provisioning and configuration tools, clustering, and virtualization tools.
Highly efficient resource automation is achieved for complex tasks such as increasing or decreasing CPU or bandwidth shares allocated to an application on a particular server, while simultaneously changing associated load balancer methods. Sychron provides the ideal solution for maximizing the utility and deployment of bladed servers, server pools and virtualized environments, by globally orchestrating the configuration, provisioning, and allocation tasks against business driven application priorities.
Platform agnostic, open, and extensible, Sychron deploys in even the most complex of infrastructures, without any changes required to applications, or ‘effector’ or ‘sensor’ technologies leveraging existing technologies and speeding up deployment of new technology initiatives.
Proven Leadership
Sychron's technology leadership is comprised of industry veterans with deep understanding of massively parallel and grid computing architectures and distributed workload scheduling. Professor Bill McColl, Sychron's Founder and Chief Technology Officer, also leads Oxford University's Scalable Parallel Computing Research Group. He previously established and led Oxford Parallel, where he developed the BSP Model - a scalable high performance framework for the control of massively parallel supercomputers, clusters and server pools. NASA used BSP in 1994 to validate the premise that low-cost commodity clusters could outperform expensive and highly engineered custom supercomputers by 10x or more in terms of price-performance.
Sychron is a recipient of the 2003 Technologic Partners' Investor's Choice Award. The company is privately funded with venture backing from Sigma Partners, Dot-EDU Ventures and First European American Ventures. | | | | www.Sychron.com |
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