I’ve written before about GreenButton, the awesome company (awesome for reasons other than the fact that they hail from my home town of Wellington, new Zealand, although that helps immensely) vendor of cross-vendor high performance compute cloud platform. I have to give a well times disclosure at this point, New Zealand is, apart from the sheep, sparsely populated and hence it’s unsurprising that I’ve helped GreenButton out on their strategy. I first came across GreenButton when I saw their CTO, Dave Fellows, presenting at a local event. His presentation showed an early use case for GreenButton, enabling video production houses to perform rendering in the cloud and reduce render times immensely. The company has since moved on to more general high performance use cases and has had some success in the financial services market.

Today at the OpenStack summit in Portland (disclosure, the OpenStack foundation, a consulting client, covered my T&E to attend the event), GreenButton is announcing that it now supports OpenStack and hence extends their cloud fabric platform across many more infrastructure vendors. Essentially the platform allows big data and big compute workloads to now be dynamically deployed to any OpenStack powered cloud where GrenButton is running – the application itself needs no changes for this to occur.

It’s a compelling proposition for the likes of big pharma companies who might want to run workloads on their own private cloud but then outsource the massive number crunching that is often involved in pharmacological research – these companies no longer have to change the application in any way to take advantage of the performance and cost benefits the public cloud can bring. GreenButtons own Mission Control management and governance product allows customers to obtain a single pane of glass view across all their public and private clouds – essentially GreenButton provides a combined multi-vendor computational platform alongside a multi-vendor management one.

Alongside the compute offering, GreenButton is utilizing NoSQL initiaitve Cassandra and OpenStack Object Storage to store metadata and the inputs and outputs related to customers workloads.

This announcement now means that GreenButton supports the major cloud players – AWS, Azure and vCloud – meaning that most use cases and technology portfolios should find a solution for their big compute projects under the GreenButton portfolio. Key features of what GreenButton and this announcement enables include:

  • Supports running Big Compute and Big Data workloads, such as Hadoop, on customer’s private and public clouds
  • Supports and broadens the scope of cloud service providers that can leverage GreenButton
  • Enhances GreenButton Mission Control governance tools for customers running multiple private clouds or leveraging a public cloud
  • Leverages the Cassandra Project and OpenStack Swift for storage of job metadata
  • Easy enablement with GreenButton’s SDK

Cross platform is increasingly the route of choice as organizations see the best solution for each particular workload and use case. Solutions like GreenButton make realizing the cross-platform dream more feasible – I’m looking forward to seeing some customer case studies of organizations using multiple OpenStack providers as well as multiple cloud vendors across other operating stacks.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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