Requires Free Membership to View
When you register, my team of editors will also send you alerts about public, private and hybrid cloud computing as well as other related technologies.
Cathleen A. Gagne, Senior Editorial Director
searchable. It's a far cry from the famously garbled output of Google Voice, as it actually works well.
But it takes a lot of computing horsepower, especially when the company has to turn audio recordings around and deliver the output back to customers online. It's a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider as well as a scientific computing lab, and it runs servers all over the map, on the cloud and in-house, on clusters, back-end application servers, and so on. Traffic comes and goes in spikes, and the firm is using application management software that is increasingly designed to work with multiple environments and handle elastic needs efficiently.
 |
||||
|
|
|||
|
||||
The company developed its automated human voice transcription technology on an in-house server farm, which Terrell said is right up there with particle physics and genome sequencing when it comes to number crunching needs. He said that the in-house infrastructure had held up well as the business grew, but Yap's service provider arm was gradually claiming more and more of his infrastructure footprint.
Terrell said they had experimented with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Rackspace Cloud Servers for extra server capacity and the ability to scale traffic as needed, but the company wanted more management capabilities for its application and services.
"Our initial interest was in being able to manage our service-level agreements (SLAs)," he said.
He picked up startup AppDynamics, which released version 2.0 of its software this week. The software lets Terrell see performance and automate control functions for his servers, on and off-premise. He can allocate resources before loads show up and direct traffic around the network to keep performance up and meet the company's SLAs, which sometimes include transcription that is "faster than real time," he said.
Your own private cloud
The most interesting thing that Terrell found about AppDynamics, which comes with an enterprise-class IT management pedigree, is that he's found himself using it to revamp his own environment into a much more flexible and efficient platform; his own private cloud.
"One thing that was more interesting [than interoperability with public clouds] was the ability to have internal clouds or tiers of servers," he said.
|  | ||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
"We have a fair number of servers involved in back-end jobs. They sit there, essentially, with their CPUs at 1% all day long."
He said that these servers could theoretically be used for handling spikes in traffic, but Terrell needs to make sure, for instance, that a database server puts a higher priority on handling records than on spill-over processing jobs.
"You can put these on very low priority in case you get slashdotted or a huge load shows up," he said.
He can set that to happen with decent precision at his management console, using up idle, in-house capacity already paid for at the outlet, before needing to look for on-demand capacity from AWS or Rackspace.
AppDynamics learns from Wiley
If that all sounds familiar to enterprise-class IT management pros, it should. AppDynamics is the brainchild of Jyoti Bansal, who was one of the chief architects at Wiley Technologies. Wiley was bought by CA and now forms part of CA's cloud services product line.
Bansal said he was able to bring several Wiley engineers with him after the $375 million acquisition and that his new venture with AppDynamics was a way to service what he saw as the proven models in cloud. Like many others, he's betting that the irresistible lure of DIY, investment-free cloud computing will lead companies down a path where they'll want to use application management software across internal and external resources without a hitch.
AppDynamics is in a tough spot, however. It has plenty of investment cash but competitors are thick on the ground. Cloud management services like the universally popular RightScale and the scrappy startup Cloudkick can already handle automation and application management and offer robust frameworks to add features almost instantly, and traditional application management and service automation are all sewn up in the enterprise world, by the likes of Oracle, IBM, HP and CA.
Carl Brooks is the Technology Writer at SearchCloudComputing.com. Contact him at cbrooks@techtarget.com.