DataSynapse To Offer FabricServer 2.5

• By Kurt Mackie
• 01/21/08

DataSynapse has upgraded its FabricServer application virtualization product, which is part of the company's suite of solutions that help businesses attain high availability for their applications.

New features in FabricServer 2.5 include a developer tool to test, package and deploy applications. In addition, DataSynapse added support for Microsoft application platforms, including .NET Framework 3.0, IIS and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The company's products currently support Java- and J2EE-based systems, along with various ISV and legacy platforms.

Support for Microsoft products is a new capability, according to Gordon Jackson, Data Synapse's virtualization evangelist, and it broadens DataSynapse's appeal, especially in the small-to-medium size market.

"In the larger organizations, there is a component of Microsoft that's there," he said. "It opens up the small-to-medium businesses for us who absolutely have a large investment in the Microsoft technologies."

DataSynapse is using virtualization to manage IT infrastructure from the business or demand side of things. What the company does with its products is different from the virtualization made popular by companies such as VMware, where virtualization is used to manage servers on the back end. Instead, DataSynapse focuses on something called "real-time infrastructure," aiming to steer resources toward meeting a company's service level agreements (SLAs).

"Real-time infrastructure is that software that dynamically responds to the business demand," Jackson explained. "We look at virtualization from the application side or the demand side, whereas the supply-side vendors of virtualizations -- like Zen, VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Sun and Oracle -- they're providing a supply side of virtual servers to that equation."

The use of virtualization on the supply or server side doesn't necessarily solve resource problems, Jackson suggested.

"Once you go beyond the utilization problem -- and certainly we can address that -- there's the whole notion of why did we become overprovisioned in the first place in the data center, and underutilized? And that's because we deploy applications in a siloed environment," he said.

DataSynapse's solutions work on the demand side and enable "dynamic allocation." They "take that supply and allocate it to those business applications in an intelligent way," Jackson explained. The company's products are designed to support back-end applications in the data center, such as solutions from "Informatica, Cognos, Business Objects and J2EE portals," he added.

Scalability and the need to drive utilization might be reasons to used DataSynapse's technologies.

"The organizations that should be looking at us are the organizations that are looking at their data centers today and they are seeing 10 or 15 percent of utilization," he said, "[and] they are seeing that as a business they have to grow."

FabricServer is built on top of DataSynapse's Grid technology and focuses on the execution of application platforms. The company's flagship product, GridServer, works at the orchestration level, enabling the scheduling and execution of architectural components and services. The company also offers a third application called VersaVision for reporting and analytics. VersaVision helps users correlate between service or application consumption and resource availability.