When you talk about data centers, the common wisdom is that bigger is better. And while that might have been true in the past, with the advent of cloud technology, more options are popping up. That’s good news for Cupertino, CA-based ScaleMP, a leader in virtualization for in-memory high-end computing. The company provides higher performance and lower total cost of ownership as compared with traditional shared-memory systems.
“The more data you can keep in memory the better, as opposed to keeping that data on a disc,” said Michael Schulman, marketing director for the company. “By creating large systems on the fly, we can now offer a host of solutions not dependent on specific hardware.”
What ScaleMP has done is create a virtualized data center, aggregating smaller computers to make a big SMP (symmetric multiprocessor).
“We call it a virtual SMP,” Schulman said. “Everyone from users to developers are now working with one system as opposed to many. Users can get access to all the computing cores and memory in a single OS. We create a big system that’s easy to use and develop on.”
With a background in the high-performance market, ScaleMP has identified the need to store more data in high-speed memory. Now they’re taking that idea to a larger audience.
“We announced a free version of our software at the recent Cloud Expo in New York,” Schulman said. “We’re asking customers to try it out. And we’ve just announced a new software release that supports many GPGPUs within a large system.”
Even with all that going on there are still some challenges, but Schulman is confident his company’s initiatives will prevail.
“People tend to think of big data as only being ‘Hadoop’ [a free, Java-based programming framework that supports the processing of large data sets in a distributed computing environment],” Schulman said. “Some people think a distributed model is the only way to go. But ignoring the buzz, most of enterprise data today is processed with traditional RDBMS, which require scale-up memory capability. Keeping this model and enhancing it with virtualization is a better and simpler way to gain real insight into terabytes of data.”
ScaleMP’s innovative Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture aggregates multiple x86 systems into a single virtual x86 system, delivering an industry-standard, high-end shared-memory computer. By using software to replace custom hardware and components, ScaleMP offers a new computing paradigm.
“We’re the only company that allows for virtualization, creating large servers in software,” Schulman said. “Simply put, it reduces cost.”
And with those five words, ScaleMP is well on its way to cornering its market.
Edited by
Blaise McNamee
