Cluster Computing:

POLYSERVE RESPONDS TO RED HAT ACQUISITION OF SISTINA

PolyServe Inc. remains firmly entrenched as the leading provider of highly available, shared data clustering software for Linux-based data centers in the aftermath of Red Hat's pending acquisition of Sistina Software, the numerical and scientific clustering software provider.

Building on more than 300 mission-critical customers, two of the largest Linux database proof points in the industry, and well-established partnerships with leading server vendors, PolyServe maintains a substantial product development lead and competitive advantages over Sistina in supporting the mission- critical data center. Sistina's product development decisions have relegated them to a small portion of the workloads in most mission-critical data centers. Based on PolyServe's experience, tens of millions of dollars of research and development (R&D) investment and at least two years of time will be required to rework Sistina's product for the mission-critical enterprise market.

"The fact of the matter is that Sistina's few global file system customers have been limited almost exclusively to scientific or numerical computing applications where the rigors of commercial workloads are non-existent," said Mike Stankey, president and CEO of PolyServe. "Unlike Sistina, PolyServe has had great success in commercial applications because we deliver a solution that meets the demanding performance and high-availability requirements of today's mission-critical data center."

PolyServe Matrix Server software enables multiple low-cost, Intel-based servers to concurrently read and write to shared data on a storage area network (SAN). Matrix Server software incorporates a true symmetric cluster file system that enables scalable data sharing, high-availability services that increase system uptime, and cluster and storage management capabilities that allow multiple servers and pools of storage to be managed as one. Without Matrix Server software, each server would have to have its own copy of data on a SAN.

Customer Experience

Among PolyServe's more than 300 mission-critical customers running database, file serving, web serving and messaging applications is the United States Department of Defense (DoD). Genco Engineering Services, a contractor for more than 22 years to the DoD, evaluated PolyServe Matrix Server and several other Linux cluster file system products as part of a project to migrate huge amounts of DoD data from UNIX servers to clusters of Linux- and Intel-based servers.

"We selected the PolyServe Matrix Server because it was the only cluster file system we tested that had no single point of failure and had integrated high availability support," said Mark Rizzo, president of Genco. "Cobbling together separate shared data and high-availability products will not meet the performance, high availability, and data integrity requirements of the DoD's mission-critical data center."

In addition to the DoD, PolyServe has been successfully deployed at Tractor Supply, Experian, W.L. Gore, Dynamic Graphics Group, Burlington Coat Factory, and Westinghouse to name a few.

Industry Analyst Perspective

"With the increasing demand for advanced clustering technologies, PolyServe's customer success in the mission-critical data center comes as no surprise," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst for the Taneja Group. "Matrix Server's symmetric architecture and integrated high-availability functionality should provide sustainable differentiation versus its competitors."

Technology Leadership in the Mission-Critical Data Center

PolyServe boasts a number of industry achievements, both in terms of advancing the state-of-the-art in Linux clustering and driving the adoption of Linux into the mission-critical enterprise. In 2002, PolyServe unveiled the world's largest clustered Oracle database on Linux proof of concept. Audited by IDC, the work demonstrated an online transaction processing (OLTP) workload running on a cluster of 10 nodes, supporting 10,000 simultaneous users and servicing a 10 terabyte database. At Oracle World in September 2003, PolyServe presented the findings of the largest, most flexible clustered Oracle database system for Linux. The findings showcased a 16-node database cluster running three databases. The test showed the benefits of on-demand scalability and flexibility of large Linux clusters, while maintaining high availability.