vScaler
Delivering Performance on Enterprise Cloud

A cloud-based approach is often heralded as the way forward when it comes to improving agility. Adroitness and flexibility are both typically uncommon traits of the modern data center which can sometimes limit the accelerating rate of change demanded by today’s businesses. Workloads are diversifying from traditional IT and now more commonly incorporate HPC, Big Data analytics, and Deep Learning and as a result, users with a broad range of different requirements are demanding support for new software environments. Businesses are now looking to the cloud to overcome limitations of static legacy infrastructures.

“A lot of workloads today are being simulated on large clusters (HPC) or compute farms to accelerate the time to insight and/or improve efficiency,” says David Power, CTO of vScaler. Recognizing that many companies lack the resources to build their own cloud and OpenStack solutions, vScaler specializes in developing cloud-based products specific to research environments. “When dealing with a broad range of scientific research groups, the ultimate goal is to provide a common infrastructure that would perform across a wide range of systems and be able to address the research requirements,” explains Power.

vScaler, a cloud infrastructure and service provider, offers on-demand HPC, Broadcast and Media, Finance and Big Data solutions to a diverse group of companies and researchers such as scientific research groups, oil and gas, public and private sector to name a few. Addressing the need for additional flexibility, and agility within the infrastructure, vScaler offers a self service portal that removes deployment complexities as well as ensures optimal performance on top of OpenStack. “The idea behind vScaler is to complement the features of traditional HPC in a more modern infrastructure by providing a familiar HPC environment and a self-service research portal,” reveals Power. “With vScaler, we have created an intelligent deployment framework, that enables us to provide application catalogs to users so that they can provision the environments they require, be it virtualized or containerized,” explains Power.

Underneath the OpenStack infrastructure, vScaler has been optimized for performance at hypervisor level.

vScaler will continue to make application specific cloud more accessible, affordable, and flexible for both enterprise and academic users worldwide

By placing workloads on top of the system and employing HPC techniques, vScaler ensures that the memory mapping between virtual and physical environments is executed in an efficient manner. vScaler has built layers of integration, facilitating a fully functional environment for non-Linux skilled users for workload management, scheduling, optimized compilers, and libraries within the system— configuring a completely operational HPC Cluster, Hadoop analytical system, or Deep Learning environment on top of OpenStack.

Use cases for the vScaler cloud platform are many and varied. A genomics company that used a traditional HPC cluster for genomics sequencing, wanted to engage commercial users to co-develop drugs, joint research, and collaborate on a number of projects. Allowing external users access to their cluster had significant security implications that would have halted the project. Using vScaler’s platform, this company augmented their internal HPC system with a cloud-based solution, offering the users a secure demilitarized zone with access to distributed data and enabling the client to work collectively on a shared platform for different projects. “This proves how small teams can grow when a cloud environment is employed,” adds Power.

vScaler is continuously expanding its infrastructure and extending organizations’ collaborative capabilities. Looking to the future, vScaler has teamed up with NVIDIA^® to integrate GPU in their solution. “vScaler will continue to make application specific cloud more accessible, affordable, and flexible for both enterprise and academic users worldwide,” concludes Power.