Parabon announces Frontier 6 at Emerging Technologies Symposium

21 Feb 2012 Reston - In front of an audience of some of the most influential decision-makers in the U.S. Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and other federal agencies, Parabon has launched the next major release of the company's flagship enterprise computing software, Frontier 6. The latest release of Frontier makes it even easier for organisations to transform existing enterprise IT resources into a single, centrally managed virtual data centre, able to provide dynamically provisioned Cloud services, extreme-scale Grid computing capacity, and system-wide resource profiling - all while continuing to support current operations.

Unveiled at AFCEA DC's "Emerging Technologies Symposium", Frontier 6 introduces a revolutionary collaborative on-line development environment - Frontier CODE - an integrated suite of technologies that provide Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities on Frontier, allowing technical and non-technical users to work together to manage the entire lifecycle of their enterprise computing applications. These include forums and wikis that aid in design and documentation, Cloud-based editing and version control of source code, a trouble ticket system that helps engineers track changes, as well as automatic deployment and execution of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications that can be made available via the Frontier App Store.

Dr. Steven Armentrout, Parabon's founder and CEO, announced: "After nearly two years in development, and designed with input from NASA scientists and engineers, we're excited to introduce Frontier CODE, which provides everything you need to create vibrant 'code-centric communities' of technical and non-technical users alike." Frontier CODE projects allow developers, working independently or in collaboration with other team members, to develop and execute Cloud- and Grid-based software applications that can scale out across the entire enterprise, or even tap into "Cloud" resources on the Internet.

For customers requiring distributed "big data" storage and processing, Parabon has also integrated Frontier with Apache Hadoop, an open source distributed filesystem (HDFS) used by many organisations for large-scale storage. Hadoop provides fault-tolerant, scalable data storage by redundantly distributing data blocks across a large number of low-cost systems, rather than an expensive, dedicated storage area network (SAN). "The decision to integrate Hadoop with Frontier was a natural choice", continued Dr. Armentrout. "Like Frontier, Hadoop was designed to run on large networks, even tens of thousands of computers. Together Frontier and Hadoop provide a single distributed computing and storage solution that is general purpose, platform independent and vastly scalable."