Techila

The sophistication and advancements in how we use data to support business decisions is increasing all the time. This will also imply higher expectations of those providing advise and expert opinions and the users will begin to expect analytics infrastructures to support comprehensive data sets. This will require bringing the usability of high-performance analytics tools to the next level.

Not all people doing data analysis are experts in computer sciences. Because of this, vendors offering analytics and decision-making solutions must be able to provide them with shielding from the complexity of the underlaying IT infrastructure.

As the R language develops and R users are learning how they can easily use cloud capacity to scale the performance of their projects, it will not be too surprising if tools like R will become the norm in businesses just as Excel today, is the defacto lingua franca for business models.

Thoran Rodrigues writes in his TechRepublic blog that while it is true that many companies have been experimenting and investing in cloud computing already, they represent a quite small percentage of the overall IT market. The positive results will attract the attention of the slow movers.

As data centers grow and spread throughout the world, the infrastructure increases in complexity exponentially. Maintaining usability will require providing the users with shielding from the complexity.

Interoperability is, of course, on the wish list of everyone. It is not easy to move from one cloud provider to another, regardless of whether you are using cloud infrastructure, cloud platforms, or cloud services. According to Mr. Rodrigues, enhancements to this are unlikely to come from the good-hearted nature of cloud vendors.

The advise of Rodrigues for the year 2012 is to experiment: If you are a newcomer to the cloud, experiment to see for yourself the benefits and concerns; if you are already a veteran, experiment in new ways – try new services, look at what other people are doing and repeat what works.

If you are looking for shielding from complexity or if you want guaranteed interoperability, perhaps it would be a good year to try what Techila can offer in your favorite cloud.

Techila has published a new familiy of tutorial videos. These tutorial videos show step-by-step how to build an autonomous private High-Performance Computing cloud with Techila, in just minutes.

Setting up a flexible private HPC cloud with Techila consists of four steps: Setting up a Techila Server, updating the license of the Server, adding and trusting Workers and creating secure accounts for the End-Users.

Techila Server can be run on a physical or virtualized platform. It is possible to run even in the cloud, which enables building a full-cloud solution. The Techila Worker software supports a full range of operating systems from Windows to Linux and Mac OS X. The Techila Worker too can run on physical, virtualized or cloud platforms. Private, hosted, public or hybrid. For example, in this tutorial, the Worker is running on VMware.

In these Techila tutorial videos you can see, how you can do this all from scratch to ready-for-computing in just minutes.

Today, businesses, research and product development projects rely heavily on number crunching in its many forms, like optimization, modeling, simulations and data analysis. Cloud services have unforeseen amounts of cost-efficient computing power available, which could meet the end-users needs. Cloud computing is conceptually relatively simple but still hard to implement and manage on the application level.

According to the Total Economic Impact Analysis by Forrester Research application development to launch ready in the cloud does not happen over night. Because of the cost of development, developers want to be careful when selecting their platform. Launch-ready application code requires optimization for the cloud environment, which falls into two categories: Minimization of cloud resource consumption and to be able to predict cloud resource consumption, and implementation of scalability and robustness that performs well in the cloud environment. Using a proven middleware, which provides scalability and shielding from the complexity could save a lot of time and money here.

According to one ISV, they “developed their first platform in four years . . . re-architected for Azure over a nine-month period” and “reused a lot of code because it was directly portable.”

Will going with a cloud create vendor dependence?

For the last decade, IT managers have been working to enable solutions without vendor lock-in. When moving to the cloud era, they do not want to take a step backward. Thomas Erl, CEO of Arcitura Education Inc. expresses a caution in a Forbes article that going with a cloud solution means buying into the specific protocols, which create a vendor dependence.

The Techila middleware enables going with a cloud without taking a step backward. Techila enables moving workloads to the cloud and across different clouds without a vendor lock-in. With Techila you can move your Workload, for example, to Amazon EC2 or Windows Azure knowing that you can move it in back to on-premise or to another cloud platform in the future without any the impact. Techila makes it possible to do the application integration to clouds in a universal way.

Techila offers customers a middleware plug-in, which enables their applications to securely harness the infinite capacity of the cloud, public or private. This makes Techila the missing link between applications and the computing capacity of the clouds. Without a cloud computing vendor lock-in.

MacRumors community tells about a brilliant example of what easy-to-integrate computing capacity can enable: Digital video recorders produce enormous amounts of content. Encoding this content on a regular Mac HTPC can take a long time.

Distributed encoding and sharing the workload across several computers can speed up the process dramatically. Setting up a private media encoding cloud with the Techila middleware is easy. In this case, an one-evening project (including the integration of the existing application). Powering the encoder with the flexibly scalable capacity of the cloud was an easy project.

If the operators would provide faster uplinks, this could be a brilliant hybrid cloud use case for anyone archiving a digital media library.

What will be your application for the Techila middleware?

The European Commission has started putting a great focus on building and growing the high-performance computing market. Conventional HPC uses supercomputers to solve advanced computation problems and is a key enabler of ground-breaking innovation that creates high wage jobs and allows Europe’s competitiveness to be maintained.

The world of high-performance computing is in the middle of a radical change and more focus will be laid on software rather than on hardware. An example of this trend is cloud computing that promises to facilitate the high performance computing market. The cloud computing power is supplied from large data centres in the network, and offers economies of scale as the cost per server is drastically lowered based on a “pay per use” principle.

The Techila middleware is a key element in enabling this change. Techila enables producing HPC from the cloud and provides an easy integration and secure use, without the complexity.