I work for Cluster Resources as their Business Infrastructure Developer. Basically in my job I find ways to make our business processes more efficient, removing touch points and creating value through IT. Really love my job and specifically, the company. The more I have come to understand our product, the more I want to tell people about how amazing it is. No one else’s product does as much as our’s does and it does some amazing things. As I have interacted with different people, I’ve come to realize that our product “Moab” is so complex that I can never explain it as fully as I would like. I decided that I basically needed a landing page that I could give out that I could consolidate my thoughts and some links to help people get introduced. Although I work for Cluster Resources, the information posted here is my own understanding of the product and does not represent any stance or opinion the company currently has. As I mentioned, I love talking about our product, but I am not a sales person. If you have questions or are interested in our product you can contact me through my contact page or by leaving a comment here (comments are posted for everyone to see) and I will put you in contact with someone who can answer your specific question. I may create some more advanced follow up posts to this if there is interest – if I do, I will edit this post and put the links at the end.
What is Moab?
From our website: Moab Cluster Suite is a policy-based intelligence engine that integrates scheduling, managing, monitoring and reporting of cluster workloads. It guarantees service levels are met while maximizing job throughput. Moab integrates with existing middleware for consolidated administrative control and holistic cluster reporting. Its graphical management interfaces and flexible policy capabilities result in decreased costs and increased ROI.
Solutions Moab Provides:
HPC (High Performance Computing):
In the past clusters of computers were most often used in academic and government facilities to perform huge calculations and manipulation of data. Moab was originally setup to work in these environments sitting on top of the cluster managing the resource managers that are set up to accept and control jobs. Moab’s unique scheduling capabilities give it the ability to increase the use of hardware and allow for less manual intervention necessary by administrators to keep the system working smoothly.
As the information age has come upon us, huge amounts of data have become prevelant in all parts of society. Many companies have to utilize large IT budgets to manage the hardware and sofware necessary to manipulate the data that they receive and make it usable for the business. With this in mind, Moab has been modified through its development to work well in other situations. These include both Cloud Computing and Data Center environments.
Adaptive Computing for Clouds and Data Center:
At Cluster Resources we sell a solution tailored to fit these environments. This solution is our Adaptive Operating Environment—Powered by Moab. In this environment Moab can intelligently manage your resources to utilize as much or as little of your hardware as necessary at any given time. Moab looks in the queue of upcoming jobs and can dynamically power on or off hardware as necessary to accomodate those jobs. For instance if your data center provides web hosting and one of your customer’s websites gets to the front page of digg and their bandwidth increases, instead of having a denial of service, or needing to turn on new hardware, Moab would recognize this increase as it was happening and would power on nodes to handle the workload seemlessly providing the bandwidth and server power necessary to handle the workload. If all of the servers that you own are utilized, Moab can utilize servers “in the cloud” and push jobs as needed to hardware carved out specifically for your organization. Here is a link to a video we have created that gives a brief overview of this solution.
Green is the new thing these days. In fact if your company hasn’t figure out some way to show you’ve gone green you are behind the times. If you have or if you haven’t, here is yet another way you can show you care about the evironment (if not the bottom line). The Green Computing solution uses moab to do things like power off unused hardware, locate high processor intensive jobs in cooler parts of the data center to allow the temperature to become more uniform throughout, consolodate jobs to as few servers as needed and even hold off performing non-essential jobs if possible until there is space on the available hardware so it doesn’t have to start up and shutdown servers more than necessary. Here is a link to a video on green computing.
Is your IT budget larger than it needs to be because you need to run both Linux and Windows servers? How often are all of your servers in use at the same time? With Hybrid Cluster – powered by Moab you can buy less servers and have them dynamically re-purposed based on the current need of your “cluster”. I personally think this is one of the coolest solutions we have. Think about it, if the main time you need to run windows servers is when your accounting jobs run at the end of the month, you can have the system DYNAMICALLY change the OS on the servers to meet the need of those jobs for that period of time. After the need is passed, the servers can either be turned off to save power, or switched back to the original operating system. How cool is that?! Here is a link to a video on the Hybrid Cluster solution.
Ok, I’ve written more than I thought I would, but I think this page now serves the purpose that I wanted it to. If you found this page from a link online, feel free to visit the Cluster Resources web page at http://www.clusterresources.com for more informaion. If ypuvwould rather as I mentioned you can ask me a question and if I can’t get the answer for you, I’ll get you to someone who can answer it.
One last note:
If you have actually read down this far you might be interested enough to know that we will be holding our 2nd annual Moab•Con Conference June 17 – 19. More information can be found on the information page.
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