Elastra Helps Turn Cloud Computing Green

As a startup company, Elastra has been trying to help pioneer the use of data center modeling languages to manage data center components at a higher level of abstraction within cloud computing deployments.

Previous versions of the Elastra cloud management software were designed to help identify the lowest cost processing option available to run a specific type of application workload. Now Elastra has extended the capabilities of its Plan Composer Architecture to identify the most energy efficient approach to running a particular application workload, optimize the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)  ratio or maximize the density of a virtual server.

According to Elastra CEO Kirill Sheynkman, this extension to the Elastra architecture is necessary because in a world with higher performance systems, the lowest cost platform is not necessarily the most energy efficient.

The Elastra Plan Composer is based primarily three markup languages for managing application and infrastructure, and then tracking the state of any given IT attribute or asset. Using that underpinning, Elastra provides an IT management framework for dynamically managing the element of a cloud computing architecture by setting polices that are executed by the markup languages.

The need for a standard approach to creating markup languages for the data center, however, has drawn the attention of the entire vendor community, which is now involved in a debate over how to implement such a standard. But it may be years before companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and VMware come to terms on such standards.