Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

Verilume Adds New Powers to Idle Datacenters 

After two years in stealth mode, startup Verilume today emerged with a suite of software designed to morph idle datacenter resources into a self-service analytics cloud environment.

About 30 percent of servers – virtual and non-virtual – are "comatose," according to a June 2015 study by the Antithesis Group and Dr. Jonathan Koomey, research fellow at Stanford University.

"In the twenty first century, every company is an IT company, but too many enterprises settle for vast inefficiencies in their IT infrastructure. The existence of so many comatose servers is a clear indication that the ways IT resources in enterprises are designed, built, provisioned, and operated need to change," the report said. "The needed changes are not primarily technical, but revolve instead around management practices, information flows, and incentives."

Verilume Forecaster helps IT managers determine their current utilization rates, then build on that insight to tap underutilized IT resources, according to the developer. Combined, Verilume Cloud Builder and Forecaster allow enterprises to deploy Verilume clouds with OpenStack or Hadoop data analytics environments without the need for internal experts, said Mike Feinberg, former senior vice of EMC's Cloud Infrastructure Group, who co-founded the company in 2013 with Dan Petrozzo, who joined Verilume after holding CIO-level positions at Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Investments and Morgan Stanley.

"People designed these resources for peak utilization and peak utilization doesn't happen, by definition, all the time. We coined the term Dark IT; they lurk in the datacenters and if they could be productive you could increase the efficiency of what people could accomplish," he told Enterprise Tech. "What we're focused 100 percent on is IT productivity – making the real customers of IT infrastructure more productive, making developers and emerging data scientists more product and more self-sufficient."

Cloud Builder dynamically architects and automates the deployment of analytics and cloud services using an organization's idle or new resources, according to Verilume. Using OpenStack services, it establishes secure networking and builds a software-defined storage platform without the need for any multi-discipline user expertise according to a user-defined schedule. IT then brokers resources based on business demand.

For its part, Forecaster uses machine learning to recommend future resource utilization needs. The two products then can find underused assets to create cloud services, Verilume said.

Verilume Cloud Service gives users one place to access both analytics and cloud services, and can provision new infrastructure such as virtual machine, storage, or Hadoop clusters.

"It's just in time cloud to customers," said Feinberg. "We leverage open source technology. We leverage open stack technology. We leverage open source strategies. We comprise, automate, and put workflow around all these technologies to weave an environment that to the end-user is protected, secure, and multi-tenant in nature. That allows it to be implemented very quickly. That allows end-users to have access very quickly."

Beta sites such as St. Luke's University Health Network used Verilume's solution to enhance its analytics capabilities.

"As a nationally recognized health network, we have an ever-growing opportunity to expand our big data analytics to deliver better patient care, improved operational efficiency, and ultimately better financial performance. Verilume will enable us to dynamically harness existing computing power in off-peak times and create an analytics environment dramatically larger than would have been reasonable if we were building a dedicated environment," said Chad Brisendine, CIO, in a statement.

About the author: Alison Diana

Managing editor of Enterprise Technology. I've been covering tech and business for many years, for publications such as InformationWeek, Baseline Magazine, and Florida Today. A native Brit and longtime Yankees fan, I live with my husband, daughter, and two cats on the Space Coast in Florida.

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