Cloud Computing

At Grid Dynamics we have broad experience in successfully evaluating, applying and adopting technologies to scale mission-critical systems and have seen the emergence of "cloud computing" as an important enabling technology. We have been at the core of cloud computing initiatives for several very large early adopters. We have partnerships and experience with the leading cloud technology providers. In addition, our R&D labs are actively involved in validating the newest cloud technologies, creating and harvesting blueprints that are used by our field practitioners to improve customers’ scalability.

Our customers are asking us these questions:

• Can you help us develop a strategy and implementation for cloud computing in 2009 and 2010?
• We have successfully implemented a small pilot cloud project, and now we want to extend this success to more departments—can you help us with adoption and a center of excellence for clouds?
• We want to explore the use of public clouds for internal applications. How can we be sure they will be secure?
• We want to reduce capital spending in 2009-2010. How can our company use clouds and still deploy mission-critical applications within budget?

Our Expertise

Grid Dynamics has successfully completed benchmarks that show how a cloud infrastructure and tools could be used to perform compute-intensive tasks that can scale on demand.

• Our first benchmark established the scalability of Amazon EC2 on a perfectly parallel mathematical problem: a Monte Carlo simulation, executed by GridGain’s popular open source map/reduce platform. We documented lessons learned in making the application scale linearly to 512 nodes.
• The second benchmark looked at a scalability of a more complex stateful application, typical to Risk Management, which requires both an in-memory data grid and a compute grid. Both grids were running on EC2 and executed by GigaSpaces XAP platform.
• The third benchmark examined a prototypical data-intensive Portfolio Analysis application used heavily in the financial services industry, and studied the performance impact of data being located close to computing, or “on the cloud” vs. “off the cloud.” This work was done in collaboration with Microsoft on their HPC++ CompFin Lab, which integrates Microsoft Windows HPC Server, a central market data database and Microsoft productivity products to provide academic community with an online service to publish, execute and manage computational finance models.

While these examples represent our work with public cloud providers, Grid Dynamics is also enabling the use of enterprise clouds. We are currently working with a major cloud tools vendor and initiating a cloud enablement program for a very large company. Our experience gives us a thorough understanding of the process bottlenecks of cloud platforms, bottlenecks of the scaling technologies and manageability aspects of the cloud model.

The combination of Grid Dynamics’ technical expertise and best practices, along with our Technology Adoption Roadmap, can deliver innovative solutions that can make clouds—both public and private—a reality.

Please contact us today for more information or to arrange for an initial assessment of your requirements.