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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / AUGUST 25, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 34
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Special Features:
COMMERCIAL GRID ACTIVITY
UNDERWAY
by William Fellows for the451.com
Grid software company Axceleon believes a wave of commercial grid
activity
is
about to get under way. It now must decide whether to ramp up its operations
more quickly than it had originally planned to catch this wave, or to continue
its current progress toward expected breakeven in a year's time. The company
wants to position itself to be acquired by an enterprise software or hardware
vendor sometime in the future. The company's EnFuzion technology has been in
use for several years and has at least 50 customers.
Impact Assessment
The Message
Grid software company Axceleon anticipates a wave of commercial grid
activity,
and needs to make a choice between quickly ramping up its operations, or
continuing its current progress toward an expected breakeven in a year's time.
Its wants to position itself for acquisition by an enterprise software or
hardware vendor.
Competitive Landscape
Sun's Grid Engine, Platform's LSF and DataSynapse's grid product are the
key
competitors. Axceleon believes the first two are geared toward the high end
and are more proprietary than its EnFuzion technology, while DataSynapse's
offering requires a high upfront cost and Java to run.
The451 Assessment
Its EnFuzion technology has been dormant for about 18 months, so it's not
yet
clear what kind of impact it can make. Axceleon, however, will have its work
cut out to gain headway against Sun and Platform. DataSynapse has been the
most aggressive of the grid startups. Axceleon's advantage is that EnFuzion
has a proven track record and a number of reference customers.
Business model Axceleon is an offshoot of Asian Linux distributor
TurboLinux,
which is now owned by Japanese software house Software Research Associates.
All the company founders are from TurboLinux, which bought the EnFuzion
technology from Slovenia-based Active Tools and brought EnFuzion creator Rok
Sosic with it. By March 1998, the software was being used to harness idle
desktop CPU capacity and it underpinned the TurboLinux Cluster Server.
However, it's been mostly dormant for the last 18 months. The company founders
raised money from Havenhill Technologies (Axceleon CEO Michael Duffy is the
managing partner of Havenhill) to buy the EnFuzion technology from TurboLinux
in 2002, and created Axceleon to bring it to market.
Axceleon's development engineering team is based in the US and overseas
(Slovenia and Australia). Corporate headquarters is in Sunnyvale, California.
It has 15 people and plans to triple in size within the next 18 months. Today
R&D investment in grid is 50 percent of the company's budget. By its second to
third
year, R&D is projected to be between 40 percent and 50 percent of budget.
Axceleon thinks it
could reach breakeven within 12 months, if it doesn't spend funding on
accelerating its product and sales development schedule to catch the wave of
grid activity it sees on the horizon. Ultimately it wants to be acquired. It
expects enterprise software application vendors and large computer companies
will be the key consolidators in the space.
Technology and strategy Axceleon believes there are three classes of grids
--
departmental, enterprise and global -- although it doesn't hold out much hope
that global will ever come into being. It says that when customers are
introduced to the concept of grid computing they typically want to deploy
across an entire organization. However, when it comes down to actual
implementation, it's usually a departmental grid that goes up.
EnFuzion 7.2 is a distributed resource manager that requires no special
software (such as Java) or hardware to run. It uses parametric processing to
split jobs into discrete components for parallel execution; the same
application is executed several times with multiple sets of input parameters.
This reduces compute time and improves resource utilization, the company says.
EnFuzion works without dedicated servers or workstations and integrates into
Windows NT, 2000 and XP as well as Linux/Unix-based environments. Axceleon
claims EnFuzion can process up to 1 million jobs per minute.
The company says there is no requirement to rewrite or modify code for use
with EnFuzion -- its APIs integrate it with a customer's applications.
EnFuzion can be monitored and controlled using C, Java, Perl, Bash and Tcl/Tk
and can be integrated with any shell or scripting language, it says. It claims
EnFuzion delivers high performance, is easy to install and use and has low
footprint and overhead, and plans to incorporate the Sun/Intel DRMAA
specification going forward.
Axceleon says it has between 50 and 100 customers, the largest of which is
JP
Morgan, and has won five new accounts in the last quarter including CBS News.
Another customer, Sprint, is using EnFuzion to enable its PeopleSoft
application stack to run on 50 systems instead of just one. It also has
financial and power companies in its prospect pipeline. It counts IBM,
Hewlett-Packard, AMD, Egenera, SGI, GE, PTI and Alias/Wavefront as partners,
with Intel in process.
EnFuzion with a 100-node capability sells for about $30,000. The company
believes enterprise software application vendors are the next key vertical
opportunity for grid independent software vendors: plumbing applications with
grid architecture.
The sales cycle is six to nine months. The implementation of a pilot
project
takes one or two days; major deployments take up to two weeks.
Competition Platform's LSF, according to Axceleon, is designed to run on a
few
high-end machines, and therefore limited by its positioning as well as a
perceived lack of cross-vendor support. Likewise, Sun Grid Engine is first and
foremost a Sun Solaris product. DataSynapse, while the most aggressive
competitor, requires Java for its product and recently failed to beat Platform
to a marquee JP Morgan account. It also requires major upfront investment in
technology. Egenera's getting significant traction on Wall Street, SGI's
ramping up its activity and Intel's clearly working up a strategy.
Axceleon says it hasn't lost business to competitors. It cites EnFuzion's
advantages: versatility, low overhead, high performance, rapid deployment,
ease of use and support for multiple operating systems. Indeed, EnFuzion is
installed along with LSF in various customers, such as JP Morgan. Its key
difference from Sun Grid Engine, Platform LSF, and workload management systems
PBS and Condor is that these tools schedule user jobs based on system policies
and resource availability. They're designed to optimize the use of resources
for sequential jobs, like electronic design automation or rendering. EnFuzion
uses parametric processing.
The company thinks Entropia is likely to move away from the grid sector,
and
expects United Devices to be a stronger competitor now that it's focused on
the enterprise. If Microsoft gets into grids, then Axceleon says it ought to
buy EnFuzion, because it's been optimized for Windows. A Microsoft product,
however, would likely be a Windows-only technology that won't fly in the
heterogeneous world grid inhabits. But Microsoft's entrance would do a couple
of very significant things – first it would validate the market; second it
would bring an awful lot of marketing to the table.
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