March 26th, 2009
Liquid Computing and the dynamic datacenter
Vikram Desai of Liquid Computing, and I had a long chat a while ago about managing a dynamic datacenter and what his company’s product, LiquidIQ, could do to help. I’ve been meaning to post something on this interesting conversation, but my notes where no where to be seen. (I know, I’ll blame it on the cat, that’s the ticket.)
How does Liquid Computing describe LiquidIQ?
We make data centers easy to manage by delivering an integrated solution that works seamlessly with your existing applications and management tools. Our product, LiquidIQ, allows you to dynamically and effortlessly manage complicated data center changes.
LiquidIQ is a converged system that combines standard physical data center resources, such as servers, switching, operating systems and network interfaces, with sophisticated management and control software.
LiquidIQ allows the entire data center to be defined and managed in software, enabling new service offerings, an order of magnitude reduction in time to deployment of applications and dramatically reduced data center operating costs. LiquidIQ works seamlessly with your existing tools for monitoring, software deployment and virtual machine management.
LiquidIQ enables customers to:
- Rapidly respond to changing business needs and environments
- Rapidly provision new data center infrastructure
- Reduce power and space consumption by up to 85%
- Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by up to 60%
- Reduce operating management expenses by 10:1
- Overcome IT staffing shortages by managing more with less
- Easily verify and audit disaster recovery/business continuity processes
Snapshot analysis
Liquid Computing is one of a number of companies that are addressing the fact that as organizations deploy virtualized workloads that can be moved from place to place to meet service level agreements or deal with outages, making the physical environment equally agile comes to the forefront as a requirement.
Some of their competitors, such as ManageIQ (see ManageIQ releases EVM 2.0), present their solutions as virtualization management. Others, such as Scalent Systems (see Conversation with Kevin Epstein, VP Marketing, Scalent), present the concept of “server repurposing.” If we survey the industry, we’d see that many suppliers offer products that address some or all of the issues found in a dynamic datacenter. I certainly don’t want to ignore the efforts of Microsoft, HP, IBM, VMware and their partners.
In the end, this means that there are many ways to address managing the physical side of a dynamic datacenter. This also means that organizations must really have a firm grasp on their requirements before entering into an agreement with any of these suppliers.
Unasked for shoot-from-the-hip advice
Liquid Computing has done a good job of creating parterships. They’ve signed agreements with AMD, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, Redhat, SUSE, VMware and even Vyatta. To round out their portfolio, I’d suggest adding Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel and companies that are offering IT solution services.
Daniel Kusnetzky is a member of the senior management team of The 451 Group. He is responsible for research and publications on a broad array of technology topics. He examines emerging technology trends, vendor strategies, research and development issues, and end-user integration requirements. You can follow Dan on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 03/26/09
