Riding herd on the cloud with DataSynapse's Federator

DataSynapse has launched a beta program for extensions to their DataSynapse Federator 1.5 allowing organizations using that tool to put the flexiblity and power of "cloud computing" to work on their current applications. (I've posted on DataSynapse several times in the past. For more information on the company please see DataSynapse and application virtualization andDataSynapse Releases FabricServer 2.5. )

It is clear that the good folks over at DataSynapse have thought deeply about both the inhibitors and the accelerators to "cloud computing" and have enhanced their product to make very good use of cloud computing resources. They've addressed the concerns that some have about having to re-architect their applications and how to manage cloud resources using the same policies and guidelines they currently use. Although this is merely speculation, it seems to me that DataSynapse will also be able to extend this concept to include other popular cloud computing hosts in the future.

They're not alone in this, however, 3Tera and IBM have both recently made announcements in this area.

What does DataSynapse Federator do?

DataSynapse Federator software allows you to move groups of resources between existing DataSynapse environments, across platforms, versions and locations. Using the Federator 1.5 beta software will extend your DataSynapse environment seamlessly onto the Amazon EC2 cloud.

This could be used to create safe testing environments, high availability/disaster recovery environments, and even create flexible, scalabile environments that can grow (or shrink) as needed.

Snapshot Analyis

The hosting, managed services, etc. industry has been talking about the idea of "pay as you go or pay as you grow" using "cloud computing" as its catch phrase. This idea seems very attractive to some. Other, more conservative IT decision makers would say that they've seen this before in other forms and the issues of security, management and the requirement to re-architect applications to use a single supplier's proprietary APIs and services are reasons they'll wait. Some of those concerns were brought to the table during a discussion a group of hosting company executives, ISV executives, end user decision makers, journalists and analysts I atteneded at the recent Parallels Summit (see Parallels Summit - a conversation with Sergei Beloussov for some information on that discussion).

DataSynapse's approach was to extend their current products to make it possible for its customers to see the cloud as part of their current environment. Applications built for GridServer or MatrixServer can move into and out of the cloud based upon the organization's own policies and guidelines. These organizations won't have to face the task of rewritting anything.