Appistry and Green Computing

Samuel Charrington, VP of Product Management and Marketing of Appistry, and I chatted about green computing and what Appistry is doing to help. After speaking with a number companies that specialize in application virtualization and processing virtualization, it's clear that one of the next marketing battlegrounds is helping organizations find the joy in being green.Going Green

What does "green" mean in this context? My post Virtualization and green computing presented a workable definition. In summary, the goal of green computing is making the best possible use of computing resources, including power, cooling, staff and computers themselves.

There is a strong tie between this concept and almost all layers of the Kusnetzky Group Model of Virtualization.

Where does Appistry fit in? When I review the capabilities of the company's product, Appistry EAF, it quickly becomes clear that it goes beyond the bounds of any one single category. The product exhibits aspects of application virtualization, processing virtualization and even management of virtualized resources. Another way to put this is Appistry ESF lives at the interscetion of grid or fabric computing and workload optimization. It could clearly be used to help organizations find their way to "greener" pastures.

Here's how the company describes Appistry EAF

Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric, Appistry's flagship product, is a software-based environment for running large-scale, time-critical applications on commodity-grade computers, without sacrificing dependability or manageability. Appistry EAF creates a "scale without fail" environment by building scalability, dependability and manageability into the application layer, thus insulating fabric-based applications from the underlying physical infrastructure and its frailties. As a result, fabric-based applications are extremely agile, able to quickly adapt to the changing demands of the business. The key features of Appistry EAF include: Scale-Out Virtualization, Application-Level Fault Tolerance, and Automated Management . Appistry EAF offers in one solution the benefits often associated with disparate technologies such as traditional grid computing, clustered application servers and virtualization:

• Scalability: Appistry EAF automatically and transparently distributes work across tens, hundreds or thousands of computers, and ensures that hardware and network resources are used efficiently for maximum scalability.
• Dependability: Appistry EAF creates a self-healing application environment by propagating application state information among multiple computers in the fabric. As a result, fabric-based applications can survive inevitable infrastructure failure, without loss of data or interruption of service.
• Deployability: Appistry EAF provides a complete set of tools for bringing new and existing applications to market quickly. Appistry customers have re-deployed existing C, Java and .NET applications to production-ready fabric environments in a matter of days.
• Manageability: Appistry EAF allows application developers and administrators to view and manage an application fabric as if it were running on a single computer, reducing development and operational complexity. Appistry EAF also dynamically discovers and assimilates new hardware and propagates application updates, increasing application agility.
• Affordability: With application-level fault tolerance, Appistry EAF enables enterprises to achieve mainframe-level dependability on low-cost commodity hardware. And by inherently providing scalability and dependability, Appistry EAF saves IT organizations from having to rely on expensive development talent to manually build those important characteristics into application environments.

Snapshot Analysis

Appistry appears to have developed some useful technology. That being said, it appears to be competing with Cassatt, DataSynapse, Digipede, Scalent Systems and a host of other players. Getting the attention of decision-makers is going to be a challenge even if the technology is useful.

The company's chant is "scalability" and that is quite different than what other competitors are saying. I need to point out here that many of the other competitors have the ability to use scale-out computing architectures to scale up computing power. They're just not using that as their central message. That minor point of differentiation might be useful in the marketing game that's underway now.

The company also chants "application fabric" on every ocassion. This is a term that needs some explaination but, is different from the terms used by other competitors. This also might be useful. What is clear is that Appistry needs to turn up the volume in its marketing efforts. I hadn't heard of them until they asked to schedule time to talk.

What do you know about Appistry? Do you use this product? Please let me know.