Lesson plan
FlexiScale
FlexiScale is a utility computing platform launched by XCalibre Communications in the summer of 2007, and subsequently acquired by Flexiant. Launched shortly after Amazon's EC2 service, it was Europe's first and the world's second cloud computing platform. Users are able to create, start, and stop servers as they require allowing rapid deployment where needed. Both Windows and Linux are supported on the FlexiScale platform. FlexiScale uses the open source Xen hypervisor. Backend storage comes from a highly redundant SAN, although the level of redundancy was called into question in August 2008, with more than 2 days of downtime resulting from an engineer mistake. The storage system previously consisted of a dual head NetApp storage array with the disk shelves connected to both heads. This was replaced with the launch of FlexiScale 2.0 in June 2010 with an "Amber Road" based storage solution from Sun Microsystems. There have been a few revisions of the FlexiScale platform, from publicly available information the first version was based on the Virtual Iron VM management software. The second revision (called FlexiScale v1.5) of the platform was based on a in-house developed VM control system, now known as Extility. The most recent release (called FlexiScale v2.0) contributed an extensively revised User Interface.
Article summary
FlexiScale is a utility computing platform launched by XCalibre Communications in the summer of 2007, and subsequently acquired by Flexiant. Launched shortly after Amazon's EC2 service, it was Europe's first and the world's second cloud computing platform. Users are able to create, start, and stop servers as they require allowing rapid deployment where needed. Both Windows and Linux are supported on the FlexiScale platform. FlexiScale uses the open source Xen hypervisor. Backend storage comes from a highly redundant SAN, although the level of redundancy was called into question in August 2008, with more than 2 days of downtime resulting from an engineer mistake. The storage system previously consisted of a dual head NetApp storage array with the disk shelves connected to both heads. This was replaced with the launch of FlexiScale 2.0 in June 2010 with an "Amber Road" based storage solution from Sun Microsystems. There have been a few revisions of the FlexiScale platform, from publicly available information the first version was based on the Virtual Iron VM management software. The second revision (called FlexiScale v1.5) of the platform was based on a in-house developed VM control system, now known as Extility. The most recent release (called FlexiScale v2.0) contributed an extensively revised User Interface.
Key claims
No claims recorded.
Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.