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Trigence - datacenter application virtualization

John Hamilton, EVP and Chief Operating Officer of Trigence, and I had a long discusion about application virtualization recently. One of the more challenging issues for suppliers of application virtualization technology is that there are many competitors each presenting different types of technology and this leaves many organizations feeling confused.
Written by Dan Kusnetzky, Contributor

John Hamilton, EVP and Chief Operating Officer of Trigence, and I had a long discusion about application virtualization recently. One of the more challenging issues for suppliers of application virtualization technology is that there are many competitors each presenting different types of technology and this leaves many organizations feeling confused. For the record, Trigence focuses on application encapsulation and isolation for server-centric applications. We'll get back to that conversation but, first a quick message from our author.

A quick review of application virtualizaiton

If we explore the concept of application virtualization we'd see that it is technology that "gets between" the application and the underlying operating system and provides an environment that might be considered "ideal" for that application without also requiring that the application be changed or re-architected. That logical or virtual environment may differ dramatically from the actual physical system environment. Although not an exhaustive list, here are some things that typically would be assigned to the application virtualization segment of the overall virtualization technology market.

  • Application encapsulation and isolation for client-side applications
  • Technology to stream or deliver encapsulated applications to client systems
  • Application encapsulation and isolation for server-side applications
  • Technology to stream or deliver encapsulated applications to servers
  • Frameworks that provide workload balancing, application migration, application restart and failover and other enhancements for server-side applications
  • Techology that enhances the scalability, performance or reliability of applications' access to structured or unstructured data that does not require changes to the application's structure.

Application virtualization operates at an application, not an operating system level. Processing virtualization technology may offer some of the same capabilities but, it works at or below the operating system level.

We bring you back to our story in progress.

What does Trigence do?

Here's a snippet from the Trigence website that explains what Trigence AE actually does.

Application virtualization for the data center is here to stay.  By turning UNIX, Linux and Windows server applications into discrete, moveable objects, Trigence AE empowers data center managers get control of their applications in ways that simplify operations and require fewer resources.

Companies around the world are using Trigence  to:

  • Manage and migrate Solaris, Linux and Windows applications throughout the data center
  • Get control of virtual or physical machine sprawl
  • Do a better job of managing all applications throughout their lifecycle from development and delivery to maintenance and modernization

Trigence is different from hyper-visor and other virtualization technologies because it encapsulates the application at a level above the OS. The result?  A completely virtualized environment where application capsules now have the freedom to be moved and managed without reconfiguration to either the application or the server.

Snapshot analysis

Trigence clearly understands that today's datacenter is made up of many different types of systems running different operating systems. It also understands that technology that just addresses only the applications running on a single operating environment; be it Linux, Unix or Windows; only adds to the issues IT administration must address. IT administration already is hip-deep in tools for all of those environments and really doesn't look forward to the deployment of more single-use tools.

With that in mind, if an organization has deployed these operating systems in its datacenters and is looking for ways to enable "utility computing", ways to manage applications across multiple platforms, or improve reliability/availability of applications, it would be beneficial for them to learn more about Trigence.

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