A couple of weeks ago, I attended a webinar with Cloudsoft, a suggested partner for Citihub in order to evaluate their offering and market positioning. They are seeking to solve the application mobility problem in Cloud Computing and have named their product solution Monterey. I had read their white paper, which they publish on their web site, via a resources page, which you need to login to.

They have a the idea that using their middleware, an infrastructure manager can on a policy basis optimise the deployment of an application for performance, cost, data, or liquidity, which they summarise as

Follow the sun, follow the moon, follow the action and follow the money

In order to offer this scale of applications mobility, they can and do offer wide area mobility; their design goal is clearly intercontinental. They position their product as middleware, although they have a platform in California, which they also describe as a reference architecture.

Their sales entry point is the applications developers. To use Monterey, you must have source code engineering rights and capability, and it works best with an application with a highly partitioned architecture, and possibly limited state. They have a Java API and the application must be architected to exist as multi-nodes, although it’s possible that a multi-node set of 1 might work . The Java IDE used is Eclipse. They have a C language pragma, and others such as C# are planned. Monterey is a truly distributed architecture, so it consumes cycles and memory on all potential application hosts. The partitioned architecture minimises the need for both shared disk and bandwidth consumption. It sees the potential hosts as either hypervisor VMs, such as Xen & VMware or bare metal resources, although since the mobile applications are java objects, there needs to by a JVM; they move the application, not the JVM, nor the OS instance nor the VM.

Their EZ Brokerage demo is awesome, they showed the effect of a follow the action and follow the sun policy rules and demonstrated their interface. I asked them for a Video so others can share its awesomeness.

The reference architecture uses Citrix Xensource, Intel and SuperMicro. They are also using Arista Networks and strongly recommend the use of 10GE network and layer 7 switching, although they and their partner switch vendors, Solarflare seek to position themselves as offering something better and cleverer. It’s another example of the re-coming of the conflated system and switch. If varying the components in the platform architecture, then one will need to ensure that it meets the requirements, especially the required network functionality and speed. One of the differentiators that Cloudsoft have is their appetite and success in selling to the financial services industry’s low latency solutions builders.

I am unclear as to how many of their customers use Monterey to implement co-tenancy.

I think it is a brilliant niche positioning. It’s an important problem to solve, they’re focusing on solving it well, and so meet one of Tim Bray’s Laws, “the big winners solve one problem well”.

Follow the sun, the moon, the action and money
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