Sensible Cloud - Leaders in Cloud Computing

sense is a cloud application platform family to leverage SOA, JEE and cloud based services and computing resources, allowing business managers to define policies and priorities of how they wish to assign runtime computing resources to individual or pools of business applications based on their own business criteria.

sense operates with existing application platforms (JEE, Java, Web Services, SOA, ESB, etc) and extends them to cloud based computing platforms like Amazon EC2 and Virtualization solutions from vendors like Xen, VMware and Hewlett Packard.

Key capabilities and benefits of sense include:

• (XML) business defined policies indicate rules for resource assignment and priorities in the face of peak loads and unexpected performance degradation – sense guarantees your business SLAs
• Federated service publication with self-discovery within the sense domain – all sense nodes and services are aware of the state of the entire domain
• Almost unlimited scaling when business applications and services are extended to include cloud based resources like Amazon – use pay-as-you-go to bypass capital expenditure to get new operating platform up and running in hours
• Guaranteed reliability and performance policies are defined by business managers with sense automatically adjusting and aligning appropriate resources from the most ‘healthy’ servers available - your most valuable business applications get the best attention and resources
• Multiple platform execution and multi-protocol communication between nodes within (and potentially across) the sense domain(s) - eliminates single-point-of-failure, including sense itself
• Intelligent service routing to the most effective platform to execute the service – makes sure your most valuable services are directed to the best provider platform available to match the required SLA
• Services can be distributed across multiple platforms to support reliability and scalability with zero impact to the client business application(s) - guaranteed scalability and reliability from day one, with no capital outlay
• Runtime business SLA (service level agreements) implemented by business managers – transparent visibility and control by business of which applications receive what computing resources

sense is an innovative cloud based technology platform to allow businesses to impose and effect business goals on their key applications and services. This permits them to automatically ensure that higher value business services are dynamically provided higher levels of computing resources to handle peak or emergency workloads smoothly. sense sits within and along side existing and emerging application platforms and manages them, to route incoming work to the most appropriate and performant delivery platform or service, based on business rules and targets. sense transparently supports and bridges between J2EE, .Net, SOA and Cloud based application platforms.

Applications wanting to benefit from sense need not take into consideration any aspects of business targets or run-time governance to achieve those targets – sense does this automatically based on rules provided by business staff. This leaves architects and development staff to concentrate on designing and developing the highest quality functionality for business applications and services, and not on the technical complexities of how to achieve certain throughput on hardware infrastructures or how to handle peak loads or unplanned service outages.

Architects usually focus on functional requirements of the application, without thinking about the “business expectations” of the functional requirements. With sense an application architect can ask his business sponsor a more meaningful set of business related questions, such as:

• what are the business rules that address the value of this service, versus that other service?
• what do you want to happen if the service is hit by unexpected peak loads or the network goes down?
• how do you want to handle ‘gold’ member requests differently from ’silver’ and ‘bronze’ members?

sense offers service level agreements (SLA) defined over functional requirements, with automatic runtime enforcement.

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We have looked at the leading Virtualization server providers and extended the sense cloud application platform to two Virtualization technology providers.

Xen and VMWare are the leading Virtualization server providers today, and offer best in class performance for both servers and operating systems together with the highest degree of management functionality. So, while every modern operating system can be virtualized with industry-leading performance, they all suffer for being disconnected from a business approach to scaling.

The sense virtualization platform compliments existing Virtualization servers.  Built on sense the sense virtualization platform federates VMs to;

• extend VMs to both traditional JEE infrastructure and to cloud computing resources (like Amazon EC2 and others) – you can operate a virtual pool of resources across multiple platform types
• add critical business constraints on how the VMs are scaled to satisfy defined _business SLA_s – this lets you add business conditions for scaling VM resources to the technical criteria generally available from today’s _virtualization servers_

The role of Sensible Cloud’s innovative cloud application platform sense, is to match the business layers of an agreement (Business SLA) with the physical layer of a virtualized platform, by instantiating the right number and quality of VMs depending on defined business rules, and maintaining a consistent and real time catalogue of what “hardware” in the cloud is available to operate a new VM instance.

sense virtualization platform

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