Meiosys Releases MetaCluster UC Version 3.0

Meiosys, a provider of checkpoint/restart, application virtualization and machine-to-machine stateful application relocation middleware for enterprise data centers today announced
the availability of MetaCluster(TM) UC 3.0, the latest generation of its
stateful application relocation software. MetaCluster UC 3.0 adds to the
previous versions of Meiosys' software in that it provides substantially more
resource support for enterprise applications, and it also adds a management
layer, which provides automation and business intelligence on top of the
MetaCluster agent technology. The technology also ensures preservation of all
application state and connections, including the status of in-flight
transactions, during the application relocation. MetaCluster UC 3.0 provides
corporate enterprises, through Meiosys' channel partner relationships, with
resource optimization and high availability capability for their business
critical applications.

MetaCluster UC 3.0, built on a Service Oriented Architecture, embodies the
latest generation of fine-grained virtualization technologies to enable
dynamic data centers to provide preservation of service levels and
infrastructure optimization on an application-agnostic basis, under all load
conditions. Unlike course-grained virtual machine technologies which run at
the operating system level and VM mobility technologies which can only move an
entire virtual machine (often comprising multiple applications) at one time,
MetaCluster runs in a middleware layer between the OS and the applications,
and provides a container technology which surrounds each application,
delivering both resource isolation and machine-to-machine mobility for
applications and application processes. MetaCluster's application
virtualization and container technology enables relocation of applications
both across physical and virtual machines. MetaCluster also provides
substantial business intelligence which enables enterprises to set thresholds
and define rules for managing the relocation of applications and application
processes from machine to machine, both to address high availability and
utilization business cases.

A recent survey conducted by Tier1 Research confirms enterprises are now
more interested in second-generation application-layer virtualization
technologies, which reside above the virtual machine layer, that focus on the
goal of providing increased service level uptime and true optimization in the
enterprise. "The utility computing vision aims to increase reliability and
performance of runtime environments while delivering IT resources in an
efficient on-demand model", says Andy Schroepfer, founder of Tier1 Research.
"Our survey of enterprise CIOs and IT operations personnel indicate that
improving availability and gaining access to performance on demand are the
most important issues on their IT agenda and are driving utility computing
adoption," he continued.

"Most current virtualization products provide hardware or operating system
level virtualization with performance overhead ranging from 10% - 30%, but
these infrastructure-level solutions continue to be more targeted at
optimizing test and development environments rather than maximizing
availability and efficiency in the enterprise data center," said Jason
Donahue, president and CEO of Meiosys. "MetaCluster UC 3.0 is all about
enabling user-transparent machine-to-machine application mobility for
business-critical applications in the enterprise data center, driven either by
an event or policy-driven basis without service interruption," he added.

Deploying MetaCluster UC 3.0 for business critical applications allows
applications to be virtualized very efficiently so that the performance impact
is unnoticeable (typically under 1%). Virtualized applications can then be
moved to the infrastructure best suited from a resource optimization and
quality of service standpoint. Server capacity can be reassigned dynamically
to achieve high levels of utilization without compromising performance. Since
MetaCluster UC 3.0 enables the state and context of the application to be
preserved during relocation, the relocation is both fast and transparent to
the users of the applications.

Features and Benefits

MetaCluster UC 3.0 is a critical component of the Services Oriented
Architecture. The ability to statefully relocate applications enables
enterprises to have:
-- Non-interruptive system maintenance achievable without service down
time
-- Dynamic workload optimization and vertical scalability
-- Predictive Failover
-- Very fast provisioning and horizontal scalability of business critical
applications such as ERP and CRM

MetaCluster UC 3.0 includes the following features:
-- Transparent checkpoint/restart for multi process, multi threaded,
sequential and MPI-based applications
-- Fine grained application virtualization that enables application to be
decoupled from the underlying infrastructure and to be encapsulated in
a lightweight, mobile application container
-- Stateful application relocation (with full state, connections and
context preserved) of applications under heavy load, both in J2EE and
non-J2EE environments
-- Complete management and intelligence layer to configure and trigger the
relocations, including a comprehensive policy engine and web based GUI
-- XML APIs allowing the easy integration of MetaCluster with network and
system management packages such as IBM Tivoli(TM) and CA UniCenter(TM)
-- Qualified support of several commercial enterprise applications such as
Oracle, WebLogic(TM) and SunOne(TM) Application Server

Availability

MetaCluster UC 3.0 is supported on AMD, Intel 32 and 64 bit architectures,
and run on Linux today. It will also be released in production on Solaris(TM)
8/SPARC(TM) in the first quarter of this 2005, and a port to Solaris 10 will
follow. It is available now through Meiosys partnerships with major platform
vendors and software companies.