Parabon Creates Turnkey Cloud Platform

Parabon Computation today is rolling out a new version of its Frontier Grid Platform that adds support for virtual machines, which company CEO Dr. Steven Armentrout said takes the concept of virtualization to its logical extreme.

Armentrout said version 5.0 of Frontier Grid Platform represents the natural convergence of grid computing platforms and cloud computing. It takes about 15 minutes to set up the system, he said, which can manage every system in a private cloud spanning laptops to the most high-end servers.

The virtual machines running on all those systems can be dynamically provisioned to allow applications running across the Frontier grid to dynamically scale across tens of thousands of nodes running multiple operating systems on the grid, he said. This is particularly compelling, he said, to organizations that have massive amounts of under-used processing capacity sitting on client systems that are attached to the network.

While grid computing has typically been associated with compute-intensive laboratory applications, many of the concepts associated with cloud computing can trace their lineage directly to grid computing. Rather than wait for providers of virtual machine software infrastructure to replicate those concepts within a closed environment, Armentrout argues that commercial IT organizations will soon embrace grid computing platforms such as Parabon’s to quickly deploy and provision their own private cloud computing platforms.