mondora releases the Oblique Scaling™

Is there a missing piece between Virtualization, Management, and Application stack? Yes. Applications speak languages not understandable from Virtualizaton platforms resulting fully unmanageable.

Applications cannot rise to the world they're suffering and everything is managed only when system is broken. The only things IT managers can do is restarting machines, switching on cpu and other things. A new approach is to monitor the system trying to anticipate suffering by monitoring CPU and other stuff.

This approach is making some Sense in Operational Management but does not making Sense in terms of business, because it tries to predict on some hardware collected data against what are real business needs.

This approach is a bottom up approach where Hardware drives Software and then Business. Hardware is like Software a vehicle for helping business and not a driver.

Imagine if a hardware producer wants to sell "normal power" and "extra power" in a startup company. "Normal power" is the basic expectation in terms of business: what will be really the next days Business; "extra power" is something that is unpredictable and everyone look for it (a big success on a campaign etc.).

This is the way! The preferred approach is to let Business to drive how the application is suffering and then choose the right policy to make it profitable.
This approach is preferred in term of Return Of Investment where the Application and Hardware are considered as a unique infrastructure that is adapting to business needs and not conversely.

Sense is a platform that is able to describe how a system is performing during time and to switch over Application nodes by anticipating possible faults. During time, Horizontal Scaling cannot be enough; the Application needs more Power by Vertical Scaling, and usually we have available "time slot" of cpu times.

In mondora, Horizontal and Vertical Scaling is handled as an Application Feature crosscutting the business behaviors. Like High Available Services available in the System Federation, of a SOA System, with different Protocol, and different Service Level Agreement configuration, mondora enable your application to perceive Hardware as an external service itself. Considering it as a High Available Service Hardware can be instrumented with a Service Level Agreement specification and self tuned, meeting business best value, while business is computing.

Sense implements Several levels of Service Statuses; this let the system to predict when is overloading and choose which is the best strategy to let the system survive.

This is done prior that a fault occurs letting the application to feel if things are going badly in terms of business.

Different strategies can be implemented when choosing, from the business point of view, how to scale.

Business is driving and mondora has produced several implementations.

For example:
- Worst Performance, Increase Power
- Latency vs Operational Time

All the above strategies are implemented and deployed -plug-ins at runtime- as Scent that enables to switch on (and off) only the needed power to let the application run meeting SLA.

This is like the common Virtualization layer, but adds more: add rule from the business to address saving; every type of saving, from energy power saving to operational costs saving. Requirements to get saving shall have hardware that enable powering on/off parts, without switching buttons. Sense will drive your saving, to meet declared SLA.

Traditional Virtualization is under the hood and is perceived by the Application, this let Application that makes Sense to Vertical Scale on several platforms.

for further information about oblique scaling contact sense@mondora.com