A Dual-Purpose Server

摘要

Elastra straddles the line between public and private clouds. Its Elastra Cloud Server-a software bundle for designing, deploying, and managing cloud applications-can be used to deploy databases in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, and Cloud Server will work in similar fashion inside data centers once an enterprise version tuned for VM-ware virtual machines is released in a few months. The ability to design an application that runs in a public cloud, private cloud, or both will appeal to IT pros who want that kind of flexibility for software development, testing, redundancy, or other purposes, says Elastra founder and CEO Kirill Sheynkman. "Using public and private clouds together, that's the thing," he says. Most of Elastra's customers are Web companies, soft-ware-as-a-service companies, and traditional software companies, such as Palo Alto Software, a developer of business-planning software. Palo Alto Software uses Cloud Server with Amazon EC2 to offer its e-mail management app. Email Pro Center, as a service to small businesses. Alex Boone, Palo Alto's senior software design engineer, says he turned to Elastra because it offered tools for deploying and managing databases in EC2 beyond what was available from Amazon. "They were first movers," he says.