Adaptive Computing, the company behind the Moab unified intelligent automation technology, today announced two significant product upgrades that address the requirements of banking, financial services and other enterprise customers deploying large internal cloud infrastructures to manage thousands of applications. Moab release 5.4 and the new Moab Viewpoint™ 1.0 empower these organizations to move beyond consolidated hardware and software infrastructures to the real promise of private clouds—the automated and intelligent delivery of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) based on application workloads.

Over the last five years, Adaptive Computing has focused its product development on providing an intelligent automation solution targeted to the world’s largest data centers running applications within heterogeneous software and hardware environments. Moab 5.4 and Moab Viewpoint 1.0 build on this foundation, furthering the enterprise’s ability to consolidate and eliminate redundant and underutilized hardware, drive usage of commoditized middleware platforms, and increase efficiency and savings through power reduction and optimization.

“Given the constant fluctuations in application usage and resource demands, everyone deploying cloud computing will pretty soon scale beyond their ability to control the infrastructure manually. Automation is essential,” said Jonathan Eunice, founder and principal IT advisor at Illuminata, Inc. “Intelligent schedulers like Adaptive Computing’s Moab adaptively match workloads to available resources, optimizing data center efficiency and—critically—doing so without overloading IT staff.”

Moab 5.4

The enhanced functionality of Moab 5.4 lays the critical software foundation for workload-driven cloud deployments. Key capabilities include:

• Moab 5.4 offers enhanced integration of Moab Services Manager™ with IBM’s xCAT provisioning software to simultaneously support multiple heterogeneous virtual machine (VM) environments, including VMware, KVM and Xen. The new functionality delivers significant savings through energy-aware consolidation of VMs under the control of Moab’s policy-based intelligent automation, including:
  • Maximized consolidation of VMs within servers while conforming to service-level agreements (SLAs) to optimize efficiency and utilization;
  • Idle resources automatically powered down to save energy;
  • The removal of performance bottlenecks from oversubscription of processor, memory and network resources through monitoring VM status metrics and initiating live migration to alternative hosts where supported by the underlying hypervisor.
• Moab 5.4 includes enhanced virtual private cloud (VPC) management functionality to expand and contract VPC resources on demand to support fluctuations in application workflow requirements.
• New memory-efficient algorithms within Moab 5.4 reduce memory requirements by as much as 80 percent compared with earlier versions, allowing a single instance of Moab 5.4 to manage much larger IaaS environments.

Moab Viewpoint™ 1.0

Moab Viewpoint 1.0 for Moab Adaptive Computing Suite™ provides users with a next-generation Web 2.0 self-service portal for the creation and management of VPCs. Using Moab Viewpoint’s powerful framework, administrators provide a customized user experience that allows users to:

• Create and manage virtual private clouds, adding and removing resources;
• Add services to a shopping cart;
• Archive and restore VPC content;
• Monitor server state and troubled resources;
• Manage physical and virtual servers.

“While consolidation and virtualization have had a significant impact on driving down IT infrastructure costs, the challenge of automating management cloud infrastructures comprising multiple operating systems and virtual environments and a variety of flavors of x86 servers remains an enormous challenge even for corporations with large budgets,” said Michael Jackson, president and COO of Adaptive Computing. “With Moab 5.4, companies will see the evolution of cloud environments from static, semi-automated environments to corporate-capable, workload-driven clouds that move both the capability and the economics of IT to the next level.”