DataSynapse on Amazon EC2 February 12, 2009
Posted by James Webster in : finance, virtualization, development , add a commentDataSynapse have just announced a service and beta program for running their grid computing platform on the Amazon EC2 service (press release here). It is only open to existing DataSynapse customers but those who do sign up will be able to run the DataSynapse engine on as many EC2 instances without incurring licensing costs during the beta period, just the CPU and transfer fees from Amazon.
In my experience DataSynapse is the grid vendor with the greatest market share in the financial services sector. I sometimes wonder why however; deployment of gridlibs can sometimes be flakey and the administration interface leaves a little to be desired (although to be fair I haven’t seen the very latest GUI). Still its good to see the major grid computing vendor supporting Amazon EC2 as a first-class host for their software. The open-source Java grid platform GridGain are allegedly working on deep EC2 integration and it will be interesting to see what they come up with.
A few other interesting and unrelated tid-bits:
- Wolfram Research announced a Home Edition of Mathematica but only available in the US and Canada for some inexplicable reason at present.
- Announced late last year was VMware Studio, an interesting looking tool for building virtual appliances, similar I guess to CohesiveFT’s Elastic Server On-Demand. Given that command line tools are available it would be interesting to think how you might integrate this into a continuous integration build perhaps, Organic Element and Will DeHaan have some similar ideas.
OSS P2V 4 free via G4U November 13, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : apple, virtualization, windows , add a commentThat title is bit of a mouthful… let me explain myself.
One of the big ideas in the world of virtualization is P2V or Physical-to-Virtual. One of the barriers to taking advantage of virtualization technology in your data-centre is the time spent setting up your new virtual machines, running under VMware Server or Xen or what-have-you, to mimic the physical machines they are replacing on one bigger, beefier (and hopefully more energy efficient) server. P2V technology aims to make it easy to migrate a complete physical server, with the OS and applications intact, to a virtual machine. The major players in the virtualization and backup space all have P2V solutions generally priced for the enterprise end of town.
Since Apple’s move to Intel architecture we have seen a few virtualization solutions for Mac OS X pop up; first from Parallels and most recently from VMware. This has made it easier for people to switch from Windows to Mac OS X knowing that they have a way to keep working with applications that do not have an OS X equivalent. At the same time though, I expect that many may resist simply because of the time needed to switch all applications from a Windows laptop to an Apple MacBook. So I got to wondering, what if there was a cheap way to go P2V from a laptop running XP to a Parallels Desktop XP virtual machine? Read on to find out how.
DIY YouTube August 28, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : web, virtualization , add a comment- Download one copy of Broadcast Machine.
- Install Broadcast Machine on an Amazon EC2 virtual machine.
- Upload your hilarious family videos to an Amazon S3 account, easily accessed via your EC2 virtual machine.
- Encourage your family, friends and co-workers to digg your site like crazy, whilst they too upload their hilarious family videos.
- Scale to taste via EC2’s SOAP web service API.
- Watch as Broadcast Machine and Amazon S3’s BitTorrent support help to reduce your bandwidth bills.
- Profit!