About Appistry

Appistry is the leading provider of application fabric software. Appistry's flagship product, Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (Appistry EAF), is a software-based environment for running large-scale, time-critical applications across a network of commodity-grade computers, without sacrificing dependability or manageability. Pioneering the next-generation of grid computing, Appistry is enabling enterprises to quickly, easily and cost-effectively deploy and manage strategic applications, thus minimizing operational complexity and increasing business agility.

Inspiration

True technological innovation only happens when an industry looks beyond its dominant assumptions and focuses on the problems at hand. Today, the IT industry is facing three key challenges:

• spiraling costs
• escalating complexity
• a need to meet ever-changing business requirements

While working on payment processing technology at Paylinx, a leading provider of enterprise software for processing credit card and other transactions, the future founders of Appistry gained first-hand experience with the inherent cost, complexity and inflexibility of traditional IT architectures. The team knew there had to be a better way to approach IT and set out to develop a software-based technology that would create a rich, new economic model for the IT industry.

Appistry was founded in 2001 by key members of the team that led Paylinx.

Innovation: The Application Fabric

Appistry’s founders envisioned a world in which applications transcend the infrastructure on which they run. In this world, silos of physical infrastructure and layers of management infrastructure are replaced by an agile, self-managing fabric running fully virtualized applications.

Determined to make this vision a reality, Appistry released the world’s first commercially available application fabric software product in February 2003. An application fabric is a software-based computing environment that enables organizations to deploy extraordinarily scalable and dependable applications on commodity hardware, without recourse to expensive infrastructure.

An application fabric builds fault-tolerance into the applications that run within it, spreading responsibility for tasks across a self-organizing network of machines that automatically share state information. If a problem arises with any machine in the fabric, another machine assumes responsibility for the current operation immediately, with no loss of data and no interruption in service.

Application fabrics offer compelling advantages for IT executives, system administrators, and developers, specifically:

• "Scale Without Fail". Application fabrics offer mainframe-level dependability for even the largest-scale applications, with fewer layers of infrastructure than traditional deployment approaches.
• Total Cost of Ownership. Because they can use commodity-grade hardware and industry-standard operating systems, fabric applications have much lower initial costs than traditionally deployed applications, and incremental costs for scaling are also dramatically lower. Application fabrics’ virtualization approach also reduces the administrative overhead required to maintain the application portfolio, lowering forward costs.
• Agility. Due to the inherent simplicity of the application fabric approach, developers can bring fabric applications to market more rapidly than conventional applications and administrators can add more capacity simply by adding inexpensive computers. As a result, application fabrics enable businesses running large-scale, time-critical applications to respond to changing conditions quickly and cost effectively.

Transformation

Appistry believes application fabrics have the potential to transform the way that organizations build, deploy and maintain software applications. We foresee a time when commercial software packages are offered with fabric deployment as a standard option.

Appistry's "scale-out virtualization" approach--the composition of many lossy machines to form a highly capable, reliable virtual one--offers many opportunities for continued innovation.

For example, in the fall of 2005, Appistry extended its fabric metaphor to include Fabric Accessible Memory. While the first two product generations virtualized applications running within a fabric, mimicking the "distributed processing unit" of a virtual fault-tolerant computer, the third-generation product added reliable, virtualized memory to this virtual server.

By focusing on our core principles of reducing costs and complexity while increasing application dependability and agility, Appistry will continue to look beyond industry expectations to deliver revolutionary technology - and benefits - to customers.