Objectivity/DB and Cloud Computing

Objectivity/DB has been used in grid environments for many years, and it was the first database to demonstrate the ability to run in batch and online modes required by the IBM grid compliant application model. The distributed processing and database architecture makes it ideal for grid deployment; cloud computing uses grid concepts to provide distributed service and storage resources across the Internet on demand.

With Objectivity/DB's flexible architecture, deploying in a cloud environment was a natural progression.

The current market leader in cloud computing is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, but Google, Microsoft and IBM have also entered the market, and Objectivity is tracking more than 20 startups providing cloud services from application development and management to virtual testing labs and continuous backup services.

Objectivity's engineers use VMWare within the engineering and quality assurance environment to provide a flexible platform. Objectivity/DB runs on multiple hardware, operating system and language variants, each with their own versions. Instead of dedicating a workstation to a particular operating system and compiler version, engineers can configure virtual machines with a release of Objectivity/DB and quickly deploy that machine on any available hardware as needed.

Given Objectivity/DB's flexible architecture, deploying Objectivity/DB in a cloud environment was a natural progression.

In 2008, Objectivity engineers used the Amazon EC2 to scale up a demonstration of a system built for a national law enforcement agency. The application stores telephone call details for the agency and allows them to quickly find patterns in calls to or from a particular number. The cloud environment enabled Objectivity to showcase the behavior of the system - even as the number of users, amounts of data and degree of parallelism increased, performance was unaffected. The only limit is the amount of cloud resource that an organization is willing to purchase for a particular exercise.

For Leon Guzenda, Objectivity's Chief Technology Officer, cloud computing represents a "deja vu" in the software industry.

"My first job after university was as an applications consultant with a small UK company called Time Sharing Limited," Leon recounted. "We sold time on DECSystem 10 mainframes to commercial or government users who had dial-up or dedicated connections. We charged them on the basis of connect time, CPU usage, disk, tape and printer usage. Almost 40 years later, there is an emerging business based on very similar principles. If history repeats itself, we'll see increased concern about security, reliability and pricing as the competition among cloud providers increases. Thankfully, Objectivity/DB was built for scalable, distributed environments, so our users should have no problems riding the latest technology wave."