Continuous Innovation and Reduced Operational Costs

Sometimes people ask me, “Why should we chose Wind River’s Titanium Cloud software platform over a ‘free’, open source alternative”? My short reply – “Continuous innovation and reduced operational costs.”

Earlier this year I wrote an article entitled “Drive Down Operations Costs with Titanium Cloud” which provided an overview of Titanium Cloud’s powerful Patch Orchestration capability.  This feature allows an entire Titanium Cloud infrastructure environment – comprising control, compute optionally storage nodes – to be patched with a single operation.  System administrators love it.

In December I asked “Ready for More NFV Magic?” and detailed the release of our In-service, cloud upgrade facility which we had included as a standard feature in a recent release of Titanium Cloud.  No one else delivers the ability to perform an *in-service*, hitless upgrade to OpenStack Mitaka – but we do!

These two features, Patch Orchestration and In-Service Upgrade, are critical enablers for companies deploying and managing live, real-world systems based on OpenStack.  Accepting “free” solutions without these capabilities is costly, especially in the long run — imagine hundreds of hours spent manually patching nodes and untold scheduled application outages for system upgrades (and truly becoming an unwelcome gift that keeps on giving!).

Now, with the latest release of Wind River Titanium Cloud, our top-notch Engineering team has gone one step better and created a new feature that combines and builds on these capabilities to reduce upgrade effort and save even more time: In-Service Upgrade Orchestration – another industry first!

As our customers continue to deploy larger and larger clouds, the time taken to upgrade those clouds from one release to the next is ever increasing.  While our previous in-service upgrade functionality represented a huge differentiated capability, it still required a number of manual steps and careful procedural organization.  The new Upgrade Orchestration feature delivers an intelligent upgrade agent that guides operators though the upgrade process, offering choices and sequencing in an intuitive and helpful manner.  Further, as part of this feature, we now support the ability to upgrade multiple nodes in parallel (computes and storage) under the control of the upgrade agent. This parallelism achieves double digit percent time savings over sequential node upgrades.  This kind of time savings can result in significant OPEX savings for customers who choose Titanium Cloud.  This parallelism is completely optional and operators define their choices when establishing an “upgrade strategy” with the agent.

Of course there are many fine details I’m not covering here in this quick blog (e.g. how the control nodes are upgraded and when; why and where human judgment and decision making comes into play; how rollbacks work, etc.).  It is a very sophisticated system that takes many factors into consideration and is based on years of industry upgrade experience – just what you’d expect from Wind River.

If you’d like to learn more about our new In-Service Upgrade Orchestration feature, and all the other innovations that sets Titanium Cloud apart from the competition, contact us to arrange for a face-to-face meeting. We’re proud of what we’re accomplishing for the industry and are eager to show you!