Practices

Our project delivery methodology fuses together deep domain knowledge, agile development practices, teamwork, and follow-the-sun global engineering. It is combination of client-facing onsite presence with predominately offsite analysis and research and development activities.

Questora on Cloud Computing

Questora has broad experience in successfully appraising, applying and adopting technologies to scale mission-critical systems. We have been at the core of cloud initiatives for some of very large early adopters of cloud computing. Our R&D labs are actively involved in validating the newest cloud technologies, creating and harvesting blueprints that are used by our field practitioners. In our Infrastructure Scalability Practice, we have completed several projects for large early adopters of cloud computing. We have partnerships and experience with key cloud providers.

Application Scalability

Application Scalability is the ability of an application to handle increased processing demand without requiring architectural changes. Increased customer expectations and dynamic usage patterns are posing new demands on applications. New and old applications are expected to be scalable and respond to demand without an interruption in service. New technologies are introducing advanced approaches to solve the scaling problem. Compute Grid and Data Grid (distributed caching) products can limit scalability challenges by introducing many options for applications.

  • A distributed cache is the most effective way to alleviate the database bottlenecks. By making the frequently used data available in a cache, applications can see tremendous performance gains.
  • A compute grid can be used for compute intensive problems. A business problem is split into granular tasks and distributed to a cluster of machines. As the problem size grows the cluster that processes it can grow in size, thereby making it scalable.
  • A new approach is introduced by GigaSpaces and is still evolving. They address the problem architecturally and advise using Space Based Architecture for linearly scalable applications.

In Questora's Application Scalability Practice, we have completed projects using all of the approaches described above.

We have expertise with:

  • Data Grids:
    Coherence, Gemstone, GigaSpaces, Terracotta, Velocity.
  • Compute Grids:
    Condor, DataSynapse, GridGain, Platform LSF, Sun Grid Engine.

Real Time HPC

Enterprises have been using High Performance Computing (HPC) and Compute Grids to solve advanced computational problems for some time now. Some of the common HPC application examples include:

  • Calculation of risk in business using Monte-Carlo simulation.
  • Proactive fraud detection
  • Search and distribution of multi-dimensional data
  • Distributed offline data warehousing

Typically these applications were designed to run in batch mode and had SLAs of results returned within hours. As companies realize that the information provided by these applications can be strategically important for immediate decision making as well as improving the user experience, they seek to reduce the SLAs for their HPC applications and move toward real time or near real time response times.