The Value of Focus

One of the regular activities we undertake at Wind River is to evaluate our products vs. alternative solutions. How do we compare?  What are our strengths and weaknesses?  How do we continue to lead?

I recently watched as a colleague went through a lengthy and frustrating process to install a commercial, enterprise class OpenStack distribution.  He had to wade through pages and pages of detailed installation instructions, navigating confusing options and a myriad of configuration choices.   This individual has considerable professional experience with OpenStack – it takes a lot to slow him down!  So when I see how complicated it can be to set-up OpenStack systems from scratch, it’s really no surprise that the uptake of the technology in the service provider market has been slower than originally expected.  If OpenStack is complex for the experts, where’s the hope for the rest of us?

I’m happy to say, we’ve solved a big piece of that challenge.  Installation and commissioning is one area where our virtualization solution, Wind River Titanium Cloud, truly stands out.  Let me explain why.

Titanium Cloud is unique in that the whole solution is installed from a single binary image.  This single image contains the full OpenStack distribution, the underlying operating system, a high performance vSwitch, and the Virtualization Infrastructure Manager (a.k.a. the VIM, responsible in large part for much of our solution’s award winning high reliability architecture).  Competing virtualization solutions come in pieces, often sold separately, e.g. first you purchase then install an operating system, then you purchase and install an OpenStack distribution.  If you want better performance, you further add a commercial vSwitch.  After all that, then you try to make the pieces work together, hopefully picking the right options and configurations to meet your performance and reliability expectations.  In the end, you might have a valid install combination that nobody has ever tried before…Better buckle up!

See what a difference it makes when you choose an Engineered vs. an ad hoc/”roll your own” strategy?

Titanium Cloud has been pre-integrated for our customers.  All the individual components were selected and built in advance, then integrated together.  Each of the layers were carefully Engineered for specific capacity and reliability targets.  The whole solution has been verified and validated to guarantee the performance we advertise.  The product is delivered and installed from a single binary image – no other pieces need to be purchased or added on.  That’s a very different process from what the other guys use.  That’s the value of a focused virtualization solution that has been purpose build for critical infrastructure.

If you want to see the difference yourself and “kick the tires” on our solution, contact us.  We’re proud of what we’ve built and are eager to demonstrate it to you!