Convergence in the Cloud

When most vendors today talk about cloud computing, they talk about infrastructure and applications as almost separate entities. But in the real world, IT organizations have to manage both the IT infrastructure and the applications that run on them. What that means in terms of cloud computing is that most IT organizations are going to be looking for cloud computing platforms that allow them to manage the applications and the systems they run on anywhere those systems reside.

What IT organizations really require, says Gigaspaces CTO Nati Shalom, is access to a holistic cloud computing platform. Gigaspaces just released version 7.1 of its namesake cloud computing platform, which Shalom says tightly integrates application and systems management inside a much easier to manage common framework for deploying applications on private or public cloud computing platforms.

The latest release of GigaSpaces adds support for distributed caching across a cluster to create what Shalom calls “elastic middleware.” That ability leverages distributed memory to boost application performance while simultaneously reducing application dependencies on databases. That, in turn, can serve to reduce the number of database licenses that an IT organization requires.

With every vendor on the planet offering a cloud implementation of their product, IT organizations can quickly wind up with a plethora of cloud computing services that they will have to spend time and money integrating. Shalom says that a better approach is to find cloud computing platforms that integrate all the services required to effectively run a cloud computing environment in the first place.

For many IT organizations, cloud computing represents a significant opportunity to modernize their IT infrastructure. The only question is how to achieve that in the quickest, simplest way possible.