IBM expands on demand portfolio with Meiosys buy

IBM has purchased privately held middleware company Meiosys, which specializes in application relocation software, Big Blue announced Thursday. The move will help IBM broaden the information on demand and virtualization capabilities of its existing Unix and Linux middleware, the company said in a release.

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Financial terms of the deal were not revealed.

Aimed at the high performance computing market, Meiosys's MetaCluster software can move applications between a server or a group of servers to other machines without the need for application modification or recompilation. IBM intends to integrate MetaCluster into its own products later this year, according to the IBM release. MetaCluster is already integrated with IBM's Tivoli Provisioning Manager software.

Also of interest to IBM is MetaCluster's checkpoint/restart capability which enables users to check in on long-running batch applications periodically and take a snapshot, a "checkpoint," of that application at that point. The snapshot is then stored to disk and can be recovered as a "restart" to try to minimize time lost should an application fail. Big Blue plans to deploy the MetaCluster technology across its high performance computing and deep computing products.

IBM will also have access to the record and replay technology Meiosys had been working on prior to the acquisition. The technology would protect against unplanned system downtime through the use of a speedy switchover mechanism ensuring that networks stay connected and applications keep running. Meiosys had intended to bundle the record and replay technologies with other development it was doing, brand it MetaCluster FT (fault tolerance), and ship the software in 2006.

Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems are Meiosys customers, using MetaCluster for their on demand computing hardware.

Privately held Meiosys was founded in 2001 and is based in Palo Alto, California, and Toulouse, France. The company had previously received four rounds of venture capital funding from backers including networking giant Cisco Systems.