Grid Extension Service

Benefits

• Grow cost-effectively: cope with increases in high-performance computing or batch-processing demands without expensive capital investment
• Respond to change faster: call on extra grid computing capacity when you need it, much more quickly than provisioning your own
• Innovate cost-effectively: don't hold back on test and development environments due to lack of grid infrastructure or processing power
• Stay in control: know where your data is at all times so that you can meet your regulatory requirements

Key features

• Rapidly provisioned, high-performance capacity without capital investment
• Faster computations and higher throughput with improved application performance
• Predictable monthly charges for grid resources
• Security: Tier 3 data centres, certified to ISO 27001 standards, and security operations staff who are all vetted before recruitment
   

Our Grid Extension Service provides you with access to grid resources that seamlessly extend your existing grid. Without any capital investment, and without sacrificing any control or security, you quickly get the capacity and performance you need. We manage the hardware and update the software, while you retain control of the design, configuration and management of the grid.

Delivered in Partnership

We deliver the Grid Extension Service in partnership with TIBCO, a leading grid technology vendor. By combining TIBCO's DataSynapse technology and expertise with our network and data centres, we can provide a grid extension solution that's designed and operated in the most effective way possible, to give you maximum flexibility and value for money.

To extend your grid capacity we'll provision Grid Engines in one of our data centres and connect the grid compute nodes in our data centre to your grid using private network access.
We offer standard physical or virtual machine images for Windows and RedHat Linux. Alternatively, we may be able to run virtual machine images supplied by you. Depending on your requirements we'll also provision the following:

• Managed Grid Server Broker: if your existing Grid Server Brokers won't have the capacity to manage job-handling to all your additional Grid Engines
• Managed Grid Server Broker, Grid Server Director or Grid Manager: if you're running DataSynapse Federator and want to add a grid platform at a Colt data centre as a resource pool under Federator.

Service Implementation

We install the Grid Manager Server software and configure it in line with your defined requirements. We provision the run-time environments and Grid Engine instances to the virtual machines and carry out the transfer of the Grid Engines to your existing grid.

Service Management and Support

We manage and maintain all grid operational functions running in our data centres 24x7. This includes:

• Monitoring the Grid Servers and Grid Engines
• Daily backup of system files and configuration
• Monitoring a range of parameters on your servers and taking any action needed, in agreement with you
• Software updates and patching, which we'll coordinate with you as necessary

We also take responsibility for incident management, problem management, configuration management and capacity management. We work within an ITIL framework to ensure consistent processes and industry best practice.