Cloud computing for the masses! Zimory goes live

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 13 January 2009 04:34

IT Industry - Development

German company Zimory plans to go live this month with what it claims to be the world's first online marketplace where organisations can buy and sell processing capacity on their virtualised data centre servers.

Zimory announced plans for the service in July 2008 and has been in beta test mode for several months. It now says: "At the end of this month, we will be launching the much anticipated Zimory Public Cloud bringing cloud computing to the masses in an eBay style market for server capacity."

Zimory, a spin-off of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, the R&D unit of Deutsche Telekom aggregats available server computing capacity from participating data centrees around the world and makes it available through an internet trading platform. According to its web site, "Using Zimory Public Cloud, you buy computing capacity quickly and flexibly - as needed and without long-term contractual commitment. Zimory handles pricing, contracting and billing procedures for you. You can also use Zimory to sell server capacities you do not need for a certain time period to other companies."

Zimory has not given any indication of what fees buyers will pay or what revenue sellers will receive from the process, but has detailed its fee structure for buyers. Customers will only be charged for actual usage and will be billed by the hour for virtual CPU usage, memory usage and data storage and for data transfers by volume. There is no sign up fee, no minimum contract period and the minimum billing period is one hour.

It claims to offer a high level of security. "Every customer has their own VLAN --virtual dedicated servers are separated from each other. Additionally the transparent SLA scheme allows a simple and clear understanding of the additional security standards of the connected clouds."

To participate in the Zimory, data centres with processing capacity to sell and corporations and individuals wanting to buy capacity install Zimory Manager on their virtualised servers and connect these to the global Zimory Marketplace: software operated by Zimory in its data centre that collects information about all available server resources and their status.

Zimory Host is the basic entity of a Zimory infrastructure. It is installed on each server which then becomes a part of a Zimory net work of computing resources. Zimory Manager allows the user to oversee and manage "an unlimited number of servers" with Zimory Host installed. I

Zimory Manager comes with a web-based graphical user interface. Servers having Zimory Host or Zimory Manager installed reside behind the Firewall within a data centre. Zimory Host and Zimory Manager are available under an Open Source license. Most of the Zimory Manager code base is Open Source, but also contains proprietary and patented functionality that manages the connection to Zimory Marketplace.

Servers that are to be part of a Zimory network must be virtual servers. Those using VMware connect natively. Others, for example a virtual server powered by Citrix Xen, connect through Zimory Host installed on the virtual host. Zimory Manager is claimed to b highly interoperable and vendor-neutral and thus to operate regardless of the type of virtual machine.

Zimory claims that, while many vendors of virtualisation technologies require that data centres change their business processes to adapt to virtualisation, its technology "is unique in seamlessly fitting with existing business processes and the technical environment in the data centre.