The difficult marriage of cloud and data-intensive apps

Two days ago, Songnian Zhou, Platform's CEO, sent out an email blast with "one of the biggest announcements in the company's history". Platform, known for its LSF workload management family, just announced their new product iSF. This middleware makes it possible to build private Clouds and run applications on the Cloud.

This coincided (not by chance) with yesterday's announcement from Platform's historically biggest competitor.

Virtualized migration

Live migration (aka on-line migration) is a process of moving running virtual machines from one physical machine to another without perceived downtime. It is one of the most fascinating and complex aspects of platform virtualization. Further in the text, I will examine its pros and cons in order to answer the question "is live migration worth using in a data center of significant size and still growing?".