Podcast: With 'Cloud' In Vogue, Suddenly Appistry Is 'Cloud.' Co-Founder Bob Lozano Explains

Just because the terminology "cloud computing" is in vogue and has become the hottest topic to hit IT in a long time doesn't necessarily give every vendor the creative license to say, "we're cloud computing, too!" Or does it?

I've known the folks at Appistry for a very long time. Back when I first met them, the name of the company was Tsunami Research and they referred to their technology as "hive computing." To be honest, I love the technology. For companies with on-premises applications that need to scale, Appistry takes a grid-like approach that not only lets you simply toss more machines at the problem, the machines don't have to be exotically configured servers. They could, for example, be ordinary desktops. Back in 2005, I blogged "Why buy Xeons when Wal-Mart Pentiums will do?"

One of the cool ideas behind hive computing was that machines could be taken out of "the hive" just as easily as they could be added. Sort of like a beehive. If a bee dies, his work is absorbed by the rest of the hive. The same goes for Appistry. If a machine in a hive dies, the rest of the hive (and the applications running on it) keep chugging along, barely noticing the that one of the systems has gone down. Even the work that that system was doing is taken over by another system. Though it's not a very green idea, one of the advantages of this approach is that, to the extent you loaded your hive with cheap PCs, you could toss crashed PC's out. That's because the cost of figuring out how to resurrect a dirt-cheap PC exceeds the cost of replacing it.

In Appistry's parlance, however, the whole "hive" technology eventually gave way to a new acronym: EAF or Enterprise Application Fabric. EAF sounds sort of catching in a "we need something marketable to enterprise IT people" sort of way. Then, in 2007, along came the phrase "cloud computing" and, would you believe it? Now, Appistry is a cloud computing solution provider. It sort of leaves you wondering who the guardian of the phrase "cloud computing" is (yes, I know, it was almost Dell) and where the hell are the terminology police when you need them? At least to double-check and make sure a crime isn't being committed.

So, how is it that Appistry, after all these years as something else, now sees itself as a cloud computing solution provider. Well, one answer, theoretically, is that much the same way you could once toss a Wal-Mart Pentium into Appistry's hive-cum-fabric-come-cloud, now, you can use machine instances or VM instances running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Earlier this year, I caught up with Appistry co-founder Bob Lozano (he's on Twitter) at MIT's Emerging Technologies conference. It was moments after CNET News.com editor-in-chief Dan Farber led an all-conference panel on cloud computing and it couldn't have been a more fitting time to hear about Lozano's views. I captured the entire interview with my digital recorder so you can stream (using the podcast player on this blog post) or download the audio.

But here is some of what I heard:

One of the more interesting pieces of the new Appistry story has to do with its support of Amazon's EC2. I asked Lozano if any benchmarks had been run to determine if going the EC2 route even made sense. Lozano told me that there were no benchmarks but that at some point, Appistry would have announcements around EC2.

Another issue I talked with Lozano about had to do with potential lock-in given that Appistry's solution is somewhat proprietary. Lock-in is one of the big fears of IT people who, as they look at the cloud, also are looking for ways to unravel all the lock-in points in their on-premises portfolios. In my questioning, I brought up Google App Engine's usage of Python (a relatively standard language) as a step in the right direction. Citing App Engine's usage of BigTable, he clearly thought I picked a bad example.

There's a community edition of Appistry that people can download for free and that allows you to run on up to 10 cores before ringing Appistry's cash register. After that, the list price is around $1,875 per core, but Bob will deal with you once you get into the higher core counts. Tell him I sent you.