abiCloud for ISP

This presentation resumes abiCloud  and is specifically focused for Internet Services Providers.

abiCloud is a set of tools that will help companies use their IT resources in a much more efficient, scalable and flexible way. And, what’s more important nowadays, will help reducing fixed costs and investment.

abiCloud allows you to create a unique virtual computer with all the company’s hardware (servers, clusters, personal computers and other devices). It also enables you to work with the cloud provider you choose (amazon, rackspace, google…) and obtain computing resources (storage, computation…) in a pay-as-you-go system.

Last but not least, abiCloud is Open Source. Anyone can access to the code, adapt it to the company’s requirements, contribute to the community with improvements and add extra applications and functionalities.

Tags: abiCloud, ISPs, product description

AbiCloud: the cloud computing of Abiquo

If a Cloud is not a Grid where does abiquo fit? Abiquo is taken from the Ubiquity definition, and regarding cloud computing the keys are abstraction and availability, so yes we do fit!

We strongly believe an standard is necessary, in this way we agree with the cloud evangelists. That’s where abiCloud is going to try to fill the gap.

First of all, we are focussing in the Cloud Resource Description definition and the Virtual Application Life cycle. OVF and WS-management is our strong bid:

As regarding the administrator interface we chose the GoGrid strategy, make it pretty first and then make it accessible. However, the chosen RIA technology is FLEX.

But that’s just the firsts steps of a big project. The community plays an important role,  so if you are interested send an e-mail to clouding@abiquo.com, ideas, feed-back, suggestions are more than welcomed.

Tags: Abiquo, cloud computing, flex

Yafray on a Cloud

This is a very good night. Between pizza and coke abiquo team have been playing and mashing up our Distributed yafray and Amazon.

A very good experience with very impresive results :) (See the video)

With this example we want to demonstrate the cloud power combined with grid computing capabilities: Use your IT infrastructure to reduce your time processes and externalize to Amazon instances when your computers can’t maintain your desired QoS. (With a low cost).

It’s time to go to sleep :) If you want to know more details or contact abiquo to integrate your hard tasks with amazon.

In a near future… more special news with abiquo + cloud computing. Stay tuned ;)

Tags: Amazon, cloud computing, Grid computing, yafray

Intensive computing with the abiquo platform

A few months ago, Santiago (one of our java architects at abiquo) developed in one morning a simple application to render scenes on a grid, using the yafray command line application as backend.

Without our platform, this image is rendered in 30 minutes (approximately). The same rendering task, using seven desktop computers and our platform, is reduced to 3 minutes, i.e. ten times faster.

In the application you can decide how to split your task; In this case, the yafray initialization state slows the process down a little. For this reason, if you decide to divide the image into more squares the execution will take longer. On the other hand, by using little squares, you can send more work to the best computer. However, this application is only a demostration :).

In order to use the intelligent agents layer, the platform learns about the service and the nodes, and the developer can apply its knowledge to split the work in dynamic squares, to send bigger squares to the best computers.

You can check here a video demostration.

Maybe it’s time to remind the data mining example using an application we gridified on the research group at the university few years ago. Now it’s working with the abiquo platform. The video here :)

Tags: abiquo platform, intensive computing, render, yafray

Optimizing water consumption with abiquo

Abiquo Labs (our R+D team) presented a prototype of the m2m platform applied to the water consumption optimization.

Spain is a country where water shortages are becoming a problem and the people are beginning to feel the urgency of improving water consumption to reduce the water needs.

This simple example can be applied to watered gardens on any council in the world :). We used plants to illustrate the case inside the Citilab building.

The technologies:

We need to interact between sensors using Zigbee communication, Bluetooth router, a Bluetooth mobile and web services (Twitter and weather information).

The information generated by the system is displayed to the user on a Flex Application, on the mobile (through a Bluetooth message) or using twitter.

Abiquo platform:

It works like a plug and play system. Using generic connectors developed by abiquo the development is becomes just too easy. The connectors employed are the following:

• Bluetooth connector.
• Zigbee connector.
• Twitter connector.
• Weather connector.

It’s easy to set up (it only takes a few minutes). A developer can connect inputs and outputs almost transparently. He or she does not need to understand Bluetooth, Zigbee or the other technologies. He only connects the data to show the information in the different interfaces.

The schema:

The cool features:

Using the abiquo platform you can obtain the following benefits:

• You can modify the hardware and you don’t need to change the applications.
• You don’t have the hardware dedicated. The devices are connected to the same network and they can be used by other applications.
• Reduce the time to market of your applications and ease code reuse.

Future:

Abiquo is finding industrial partners and public institutions to develop the optimization of water cycle. An ambitious project where abiquo applys its concept of “distributed intelligence“.

The idea is to create a distributed and large wireless sensor network of low-cost sensors to control key places (greens, rivers, drains, etc.), connected to 2.0 webs to sensitize the citizen and connected to water utility industries and public administration to optimize the water consumption.

Please, you can send mail to contact@abiquo.com to ask us about the demo.

Tags: 2.0, Abiquo, bluetooth, m2m, water, web services, zigbee