New GigaSpaces Cloudify – The First Cloud Application Platform That Brings Mission-Critical Applications to Any Cloud

Cloudify Provides Automatic On-Boarding of Any App, On Any Cloud, With Full Control and Zero Code Change

New York, October 24, 2011
/Targetwire/ – GigaSpaces Technologies, a pioneer of next generation application platforms for mission-critical applications, announces the beta release of a new product. GigaSpaces Cloudify is the industry’s first cloud application platform designed to enable enterprises and ISVs to take even their most mission-critical applications to any cloud, without forcing any code changes or cloud vendor lock-in.

"Enterprises increasingly want to move to the cloud – whether private or hybrid – to gain the benefits of agility and cost reduction. However, deploying mission-critical applications to the cloud can present significant challenges," said Adi Paz, EVP Marketing and Business Development at GigaSpaces. "Today, achieving cloud benefits requires vast investments of time and resources to rewrite applications, and so the bulk of enterprise business apps have still not made the move. Cloudify eliminates these barriers."

GigaSpaces Cloudify leverages the company’s decade of experience in virtualisation and delivering application platforms for large-scale, mission-critical applications. GigaSpaces has recently entered multiple partnerships based on these capabilities, including partnering with Microsoft to deliver a specialised edition, Cloudify for Azure, which enables on-boarding Java applications onto the Azure cloud. Other collaborations include work with Citrix and Rackspace to create an open PaaS solution with OpenStack (CloudStack included). This makes Cloudify the only platform that supports any cloud, with specific integration with the most diverse array of Cloud environments. Moreover, Cloudify makes it possible to take any application and run it in a local development environment and then move it your cloud of choice, whether private or public, completely seamlessly with only a simple configuration switch.

Product Information & Features

Cloudify was designed based on the following principles:

  • Any app, any stack: Using a recipe-based deployment mechanism, Cloudify can deploy any middleware stack (Java/Spring, JEE, PHP, .NET, Ruby on Rails or others), whether a relational or non-relational data store is employed (e.g., MySQL or Apache Cassandra), or if other middleware components are added. In addition, Cloudify provides support for application services based on the GigaSpaces XAP stack.
  • Any cloud: Unlike other platforms that have inherent business conflicts by supporting their own cloud infrastructure as the primary choice, Cloudify remains the only truly independent platform, enabling enterprises a true lock-free cloud infrastructure choice.The choice-enabler is Cloudify’s Open Cloud Driver, which provides an open plug-in that leverages and extends the jclouds framework. Cloudify comes with a set of ready-made plug-ins that support common public and private cloud environments. Unlike other cloud platforms, Cloudify was designed to also support non-virtualised environments, enabling deployment of a fully elastic application on top of bare metal machines. This is important for network-sensitive applications that want to leverage the cost benefits and agility of cloud-based environments but are not ready to take the performance hit that often comes with virtualising the network environment.
  • Full control: Other PaaS solutions often oblige a trade-off between a gain in productivity and loss of control. Cloudify comes with predefined application recipes and cloud platform integration specs that provide the high productivity and simplicity businesses seek in a PaaS solution. Cloudify also provides full access to the underlying infrastructure resources, enabling full control over the application stack, cloud environment, language choice, monitoring and tuning of the application environment – to whatever extent desired.

At the core of Cloudify stands a mechanism of application recipes. A recipe is a blueprint that provides Cloudify all the details needed to run an application, including what middleware services to run, what the dependencies are between these services, how to install the services and where to find the application and service binaries, when to spin more instances or terminate existing ones, and even how to monitor each of the services. Recipes are expressed in a Groovy-based DSL (domain specific language), making them very intuitive and easy to extend and customise.

Cloudify Values & Benefits

"Cloudify enables businesses to move their applications to the cloud with no code change and minimal learning curve – meaning that they can continue to develop in their traditional environment and leverage existing skills and assets, while gaining the cost and agility benefits of deploying to the cloud," says Nati Shalom, CTO at GigaSpaces. "We also enable our customers to survive a complete data centre failure, and to burst into the cloud at peak loads, by making replicas of the data available across multiple data centres and availability zones."

GigaSpaces Cloudify provides the following unique values:

  • Only platform that can on-board mission critical enterprise and big-data applications to any cloud, quickly and seamlessly, with no code change.
  • More than pure orchestration: Includes extended AWS-like services, with support for any stack, using an extensible recipe mechanism with multiple out-of-the-box blueprints for leading open source platforms such as Tomcat, JBoss, ActiveMQ, MySQL, MongoDB, and Cassandra.
  • Ensures business continuity: Built-in application- and cluster-aware monitoring, auto-scaling to maintain service levels, and self-healing to recover crashed or hung services.
  • Avoiding vendor lock-in: Enables businesses to maintain existing development practices, and provides support for any application stack.
  • Enables gradual cloud adoption: Enterprises can gain immediate benefits such as automation and cost saving with minimal effort, and get additional features such as elastic scaling later, with no interruption of application functionality.

Pricing and Download Information

The Cloudify beta version is currently available for download here. This version already includes integration with Tomcat, JBoss, Cassandra, MySQL, Spring, MongoDB, HSQL, ActiveMQ and PostgreSQL. It also comes with a built-in local cloud, which makes it possible to run a complete application stack on your local desktop. The product will include a feature-rich free edition, designed to support real application workloads and enterprise use cases. Full official pricing will be available upon general release in December.

Learn more about Cloudify at:

Website: www.gigaspaces.com/Cloudify

Blog: blog.gigaspaces.com

Webcast: Uri Cohen, GigaSpaces VP Product Management, will present an online demo of Cloudify on Wednesday, November 2, 2011 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT. Register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/150134776.

Conference: GigaSpaces will speak about Cloudify at the IGT International Cloud Summit on Monday, October 31, 2011 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Register for the conference at http://igtdld2011.eventbrite.com/?ref=ecount.

About GigaSpaces
GigaSpaces Technologies is the pioneer of a new generation of application virtualisation platforms and a leading provider of end-to-end scaling solutions for distributed, mission-critical application environments, and cloud enabling technologies. GigaSpaces is the only platform on the market that offers truly silo-free architecture, along with operational agility and openness, delivering enhanced efficiency, extreme performance and always-on availability. The GigaSpaces solutions are designed from the ground up to run on any cloud environment – private, public, or hybrid – and offer a pain-free, evolutionary path to meet tomorrow’s IT challenges.

Hundreds of organisations worldwide are leveraging GigaSpaces’ technology to enhance IT efficiency and performance, among which are Fortune Global 500 companies, including top financial service enterprises, e-commerce companies, online gaming providers, and telecom carriers.
For more information, visit http://www.gigaspaces.com, or our blog at http://blog.gigaspaces.com.

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Contact Info:
Laura Ackerman for GigaSpaces
Rainier Communications
Lackerman@rainierco.com
508-475-0025 x115


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