Conversation with Platform Computing's Songnian Zhou

Platform Computing has been a player in virtual processing and management software for virtualized resources since 1992. Platform LSF has been the company's flagship product since those early days. It has found a home in electronics, financial services, government, life sciences, manufacturing and oil/gas. I've been following them since I first joined IDC in 1993.

I was delighted to enjoy the rare opportunity to speak with Songnian Zhou, Platform's CEO and Chairman, and thought I'd pass on how he views the adoption of virtual processing technology.

Trends Accelerating use of grid computing

Songnian and I spent a while reviewing all of the trends that are causing organizations to consider deploying parallel processing/grid computing/cluster computing approaches.

• Organizations are facing a world that is changing more rapidly than ever before. They don't enjoy flying blind and would like to develop ways to create strategic and tactical plans based upon real data rather than guesswork.
• Organizations are facing compliance issues in an ever more complex web of regulations. Complying with those regulations often requires that extensive computational analysis of organizational data be done very rapidly.
• Amazingly powerful systems have become both very small and very powerful. Entire grid environments are now available from several of Platform Computing's hardware partners that fit in a single, small enclosure and can be purchased for well below $50,000.
• Applications are now being developed using architectures that fit well in a grid/cluster computing environment
• Virtualization technology has moved from something only found in the datacenters of the largest organizations to something seen on industry standard systems and desktops.

We both could easily see how this confluence of trends would cause organizations that don't traditionally consider high performance computing tools to try them out now.

What does Platform do?

Platform Computing has developed a whole portfolio of products that would allow organizations to deal with these trends. It's first product, Platform LSF, has spawned a host of related products including the following:

Platform Accelerate, a series of products that distributes and manages large complex computational tasks across tens of thousands of systems

• Platform LSF - manage and accelerates batch workload processing using parallel processing/grid computing/cluster computing techniques. Several additional products are available to help organizations manage individual workflows, software licenses, sessions in a LSF-based environment
• Platform Symphony - service-oriented middleware helping developers use parallel processing/grid computing/cluster computing approaches without having to become rocket scientists
• Platform Enterprise Grid Orchestrator - tool to integrate and automate the operations of geographically distributed grids/clusters

Additionally, Platform offers Platform Manage, a series of management tools including:

• Platform RTM - realtime monitor for grid/cluster environments
• Platform Manager - Flexible cluster management and monitoring tool
• Platform Analytics - collects, analyzes and visualizes grid/cluster usage
• Platform VM Orchestrator - allows virtual machines/systems to be deployed and managed as part of an LSF-based environment

Snapshot Analysis

Platform has both a mature portfolio of products that address virtualized envirornments and a very large list of competitors. Although Platform has a strong track record of success in some markets, it has not been able to grab the attention of IT decision makers in the face of the noise being made by competitors. The fact that the cost of grid computing environments has dropped dramatically in the recent past gives the company hopes of riding a wave of corporate adoption. Unfortunately, the executives of at least 20 other companies that offer competitive products see the same thing and are working very hard to get there first.

If your organization is looking into how to orchestrate complex multi-system environments to accelerate application performance, Platform's products should be on your list.