FREMONT, California – April 4, 2006 – Themis Computer announced Quorum, its distributed computing resource management software for mission critical applications. Quorum is a policy-based system that performs automated closed loop management of application QoS and allocation of resources for real-time systems.
Themis’ Quorum is a distributed computing resource manager software system for the automated management of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), applications and hardware resource in real-time, mission critical distributed systems. Standards-based, Quorum supports a wide variety of industry standard platforms including Sun® Solaris™, Linux®, Microsoft® Windows® and LynxOS® servers, as well as various network switches and SMI-compliant Storage Area Networks.
“Themis’ Quorum helps CIOs and OEMs drive down total cost of ownership, for Mission Critical IT resources and infrastructure. When Themis first started the development of its Slice-TM scalable computing initiative, it was painfully clear that there were no real-time computing resource managers that could automatically manage quality of service for legacy applications,” stated William E. Kehret, President of Themis Computer. “We also realized the need to provide standards driven API’s for forward looking, enhanced application monitoring and control. Quorum uniquely addresses this market need and integrates well with other managers in a heterogeneous, multi-vendor environment of software, servers, switches and storage,” Mr. Kehret added.
Quorum provides users four major benefits:
1. Automated monitoring and management of SLAs and Application Quality of Service (AQoS). By dynamically allocating computing resources and performing closed loop monitoring of application performance, Quorum maintains system performance under conditions of varying load and resource availability.
2. Real-time resource and application provisioning. Systems are dynamically reconfigured to meet changes in a rapidly changing environment. Policy based resource allocation tunes a system to the mission at hand. This is done in real-time without operator intervention.
3. High system reliability and availability. Quorum enables a flexible, highly reliable system by treating the entire computing system as a pool of computers where any computer can serve as a backup or spare for fault tolerance. Quorum will quickly replace a failing resource from the available pool.
4. Reduced acquisition, operation, and maintenance costs. By enabling flexible utilization of computing resources, Quorum reduces the hardware requirements for high availability systems and its automated, policy based operation reduces the need for operator intervention.
The Quorum software provides flexible, policy-based, automated decision-making for monitoring and managing mission critical systems. It simplifies the daily management of complex applications by using flexible user-defined policies to manage application and system performance in real-time with sub-second response time.
Software Architecture
An automated, policy-based system for the closed-loop management of real time systems, Quorum supports a Manager-of-Managers architecture that allows a distributed system to be hierarchically connected to a higher-level manager. In this way, a distributed system can be viewed as a single entity, and can be integrated as a Quorum managed asset within a larger Quorum managed system.
Themis Quorum automates three systems-management processes:
Monitor – monitors, models and predicts how much computing power applications require to meet AQoS objectives.
Decide – Determines the resource configuration and then allocates available resources from server pools or from lower-priority applications to applications with the higher-priority applications as defined by user-specified policies.
Act – configures and reconfigures servers, software, storage, network devices and clusters to implement the requested application environments
Quorum is a standards-based system built on top of the “Common Information Model / Web Based Enterprise Management” (CIM/WBEM), a DMTF standard. CIM/WBEM provides object-oriented schemas for a wide variety of devices and uses XML to encode CIM objects and transport them via standard http(s) protocols. Quorum is also fully compatible with SNMP devices and is extensible to new devices via either SNMP or CIM/WBEM
Quorum incorporates flexible, policy-based, automated decision-making. It maintains user specified levels of AQoS without operator intervention. Quorum provides:
• Protection against hardware & software faults with minimal operator workload
• A standards-based instrumentation API for publishing internal application performance metrics to provide more sophisticated AQoS control
• Features to enable monitoring of AQoS for legacy applications
• Policy-based resource allocation
Other significant features include:
• Dynamic system configurations which can be changed on the fly
• Device discovery for new hardware
• Integration with 3rd party management systems through CIM
• Customizable Visualization Layer with a Java API for OEM-specific look and feel.
Quorum Price and Availability
Quorum is available now, with single processor pricing below $1,500, in OEM quantities. Please contact factory for evaluation software or for volume order requirements.
See Themis’ new Quorum and Slice solutions at LinuxWorld in Boston, MA April 4-6 in Booth #836 and at Sea-Air-Space 2006 Expo in Washington, DC in Booth #4001 April 4-6.
About Themis Computer
Themis Computer is a leading developer and supplier of high performance VME and Compact PCI single-board computers, as well as systems for mission-critical telecommunications, military/aerospace, and industrial embedded applications. Themis provides open standards-based embedded computing platforms that support the Solaris, Linux, and Windows operating systems. Themis’ products incorporate features designed to ensure high reliability and availability while reducing the risks of failure caused by extreme environments. An ISO 9001 certified company, Themis Computer practices Total Quality Management (TQM) in all areas of its business, from engineering and manufacturing to customer service. Themis Computer is headquartered in Fremont, California and offers worldwide service and support. For more information please visit www.themis.com or email: [email protected].
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Themis, the Themis logo and Quorum are trademarks or registered trademarks of Themis Computer. All other trademarks are trademarks of their respective companies.