Cloudware Open Architecture For Cloud Computing

The Web has succeeded by allowing individuals and companies to add their own unique capabilities to The Net. Cloud Computing should develop the same way. Developers shouldn't be forced to compromise on the selection of development platforms, software, or security. Cloudware is an architecture intended to provide an open framework allowing the development of a cloud computing environment that's rigorous enough to take on any web or enterprise application.





Cloudware incorporates the fundamental building blocks used in developing today's most popular applications; storage and computing, software catalog, definition and control, plus how they all relate to each other. More importantly, the architecture is vendor agnostic so that third party vendors, not just 3tera, can participate in the system. The Cloudware architecture supports the most popular operating systems - Linux, Solaris and Windows - and is targeted toward clients who want to explore the extreme scale and flexibility of cloud computing infrastructures quickly and easily.

Cloudware will be rolled out in stages over the next twelve to twenty-four months, but much of the technology necessary to implement Cloudware has been proven in our AppLogicâ„¢ grid operating system over the past two years. Some of the upcoming features include adding support for Solaris and Windows to existing support for Linux; choice of multiple data centers worldwide, pre-built MySQL clusters, database replication appliances and NAS integration with third party storage solutions

When virtual appliances aren't running, they consume no processing resources and only a small amount of storage. As such, rather than using them sparingly as traditional software is, virtual appliances can be packaged with every application that uses them. In essence, the virtual appliances form a disposable infrastructure on which the application relies while operating. When the application is run, the virtual infrastructure it requires is created dynamically on the grid, maintained while it runs, and disposed of when it stops.

The use of virtual appliances makes applications scalable within AppLogic as well. Each virtual appliance has a range of resource usage over which it produces valuable output. The actual resources used in production are only assigned at runtime. For instance, a web server virtual appliance may require 5% of a CPU and 64MB of RAM to respond to a query and may stop providing greater output at 50% of a CPU and 1GB of memory. A two-tier application that includes this virtual appliance in addition to five or six other virtual appliances, may run with as little as 25% of a CPU and 300MB RAM, but still be able to scale to more than 3 servers and 6GB of memory.