Our Approach to Virtualization
Computing is quickly moving toward a web based, application stack. Virtualization is turning to be a killer software application. A sort of stack wihin the bigger stack. Today, there's the hypervisor, host OSes, guest OSes, and a few management utilities, interfaces to control virtual machines such as Enomalism (see below).
We believe that the use of a virtualized methodology for highly specialized software that does one or two things really well and is completely seperated from the other application that may be running on the same server. This seperation of components onto one or more servers is where we believe the power in server virtualization lies.
Looking forward we feel applcation stacks will grow to include paravirtualized operating systems (operating systems that are aware of the fact that they're running in as a virtual machine, and that autonomically self-optimize for that environment such as our clustered hosting components) as well as specialized OSes (software appliances) designed to do nothing else but proxy hardware drivers as a host to the guest OSes. We believe that within ten years the hard drive will be nothing more then a local caching mechanism for both local and remotly distributed VM's. (Yes, we like to predict the future). Moreover, the operating environment will move from a single computer centric model to that of a parallel or communal one. The true power of computing is only realized in a collective form.
Elastic Computing
Elastic Computing is an approach to application development and deloyment that enables hardware, bandwidth and storage resource usage in a flexible and elastic way. Each system can be scaled on the fly, without affecting other applications deployed on the grid. Typically Elastic Computing is achieved on a Virtualized Grid environment via a elastic hosting platform. A virtualized image is deployed to dozens (possibly hundreds or thousands) of servers acting as one. Traditionally you would deploy a single operating system to a single machine. Elastic Computing runs an virtualized operating system (Linux, Windows, *Nix) on many servers all at once.
An elastic platform is data-driven, which means that no human interaction is needed to add and reduce resources applied to a given application elastically adjusting to meet system demand / requirements and billed on a usage basis.
Content Virtualization
Content virtualization is a model that allows for a microkernel (Xen) to be compiled in conjunction to the core content management system components. A webservices architecture as well as an web interface allows for a completely virtualized content platform capable of being infinitely scalable.
Applying the designs of Virtualization, Web services and SOA to content management presents an opportunity for a virtual content layer, where enterprise content management is defined not as a monolithic repository but rather as a logical library of interchangeable self-describing & self replicating components.
This approach allows for content management systems that can be configured to run on a single server, multiple physical servers, multiple virtualized servers, grids or a combination of all of the above, nativily, without modification. This allows even the simplest applications (CMS,CRM,Blog,Forum,etc) to be scaled to millions of users with little or no additional development work. As system requirements grow, so does your content management system, on the fly.
