The pressure to do more with less has become a ubiquitous feature of today's enterprise IT landscape. Each participant in the IT lifecycle—executives, managers, administrators, developers, even vendors—has been challenged to maximize business impact while simultaneously reducing costs and improving service levels.

Why Hive Computing?

Hive computing offers significant benefits at each stage of the developdeploymaintain application lifecycle. Consider the following examples:

Development

The Hive fabric insulates the application from the fragility and flux inherent in the underlying infrastructure. The application inherits reliability, scalability, and other characteristics the Hive itself, freeing application developers and allowing them to focus on the core business functionality required by their application.

Deployment

Because a Hive runs on standards-based computers—whether white boxes, rack-mounted PCs or branded blade servers—running common operating systems like Linux or Windows, the capital outlay associated with the deployment of new applications is significantly reduced.

Maintenance

The autonomic characteristics of a Hive make maintenance a breeze. Through assimilation, expanding the capacity of a running Hive is as simple as plugging new machines into the network—the Hive determines the state of newly connected equipment and takes the actions required to introduce it into the running transaction flow.

Next: Hive Computing —The Best of All Worlds