Recently, however, news came out that at least the first iteration of this chip was being officially canned. Although it’s not unheard of for a big company like Intel to sack a project, in this case the number of man years, resources and buzz built up around Larrabee represented a substantial investment on Intel’s part.

This news for me really drove home the challenges that the computing and software industry is facing as we continue to attempt to scale out as opposed to up. To build more processors on a chip instead of faster ones. To fundamentally change the way we design and implement hardware and the applications that run on them.

This stuff is hard! Really hard, in fact. And although the concept of putting a bunch of processors together on a chip is simple, actually harnessing that power to do real work is anything but. There are many reasons for this, but one is that writing multi-threaded software that actually can tap into this power is exceptionally more challenging that just waiting for Intel or AMD to produce another CPU that is 50% faster than the last.

It’s hard to conject exactly what stopped Larrabee in its tracks as it was seemingly so close to launch. What we do know is there was a tremendous amount of horsepower built into the chip, but tapping that potential apparently proved elusive. A public demonstration of Larrabee at a recent trade event was met with a relative ‘Hmmm…where’s the beef’ kind of reaction from the press and analysts.

This, in essence, is exactly why we’re here. As the hardware scales out with multi-core and the applications get more complex, the tools and infrastructure needed to support them, including debugging tools and defect resolution solutions, need to grow and evolve as well. And this is what Replay is all about – making the problem resolution process manageable so that enterprises can move forward with creating scalable and distributed complex applications.

I will be anxious to see what AMD and NVIDIA are working on in their respective labs as each race against each other and Intel to keep up with Mr. Moore. It’s an exciting time as the industry looks for innovation from our hardware and software vendors to keep up the pace of advancement that we’ve grown to expect…

Onward and outward!

Software teams use our debugging software tools to quickly identify and resolve software defects, as well as performance and security issues. The latest customer additions enhance our already-impressive list of customers.

Our revolutionary record and replay technology enables customers to know exactly when a problem occurs during development, testing or in production, which means they can reproduce and resolve it quickly.

Our technology not only eliminates non-reproducible software bugs, but helps to ensure that our customers’ software is delivered on time and on budget.

Maintaining software applications and fixing errors costs companies millions of dollars and impacts their ability to deliver products to market on time. The first step to fixing any application defect is to reproduce it, but traditionally this has been an inefficient, time consuming and manual process.

Replay’s patented ReplayDIRECTOR functions like a DVR for software applications, recording inputs and events affecting the software, and providing the ability to “rewind” and “replay” any issue or scenario exactly as it happened.

Our tools are useful to a wide range of companies, including service providers, software vendors, banks and insurance companies. Replay addresses a common pain for any organization that is building software, and we are passionate about delivering a valuable product across all markets.

Windows 7 presents both enormous challenges and opportunities for application teams as companies upgrade en masse to the new operating system. Better performance and ease-of-use are coupled with potential compatibility and support issues. While Vista was a challenge for application teams, Windows 7 offers a fresh start, and Replay technology is now available to make that experience even better.

With ReplayDIRECTOR, application teams facing a migration to Windows 7 gain the peace of mind that they can identify any issues in their software fast, and with less cost. Replay’s multiple platform support allows more organizations to save significant time and money by resolving defects, performance and security issues.

ReplayDIRECTOR functions like a DVR for software applications, recording inputs and events affecting the software, and providing the ability to “rewind” and “replay” any issue or scenario exactly as it happened. With support for all recent versions of Windows, including Windows 7, Replay Solutions offers the most comprehensive record and replay capabilities for organizations developing or deploying Java Web applications on Windows.

Maintaining software applications, debugging software and fixing errors costs companies millions of dollars and impacts the ability to get products to market on time. The first step to fixing any application defect is to reproduce it, but traditionally this has been an inefficient, time consuming and manual process. ReplayDIRECTOR solves this problem.

Extensively tested, ReplayDIRECTOR is the first application-level Java record/replay solution available on the market for Windows 7.

In this Web event you will learn about an innovative new automation feature for:
- Tomcat and JBoss Web Applications
- WebLogic and WebSphere Applications
- Eclipse JavaEE Development Environments

There will be a demonstration showing how application errors in Tomcat and JBoss environments can be identified, isolated and passed onto members of Virtual Development Teams for rapid bug replay and repoduction. The ReplayDIRECTOR™ functions like a DVR for applications by recording all inputs and events affecting your software while it is running, and providing the ability to replay exactly what happened. Defects can be reproduced immediately without the need to replicate the environment and conditions that the defect occurred in.

Speaker: Jonathan Lindo is co-founder and CEO of Replay Solutions, and is passionate about improving the way software is built and delivered. His research has resulted in numerous patent filings for technologies including high performance networking, application virtualization, and the record/replay of computer programs.

Developers, QA and Operations Professionals are invited to attend this event on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PST.

Please click here to register.

Stacey gives her new article the title “Intel, Microsoft Gorging on Multicore Programming Startups” and reports that three out of the five startups have been “snapped up” by Intel and Microsoft.

Intel’s goal is to offer tools to make its chips a better bargain for companies that want to use multicore chips without investing a lot of money in rewriting their code. Microsoft’s interest is in an overall improvement to its high-performance computing software for computing clusters and desktops, as well as of course promoting the use of Windows my making it easier to build great applications on their OS.

Needless to say, we agree with Stacey. While Replay’s debugging software is not limited to multicore environments, it allows programmers to replay exactly what happened in the moments before a software crash, or performance slowdown, or security breach. With this ability, they can immediately see what the problem is and fix it.

Replay’s recording technology is useful in any complex environment, including multicore environments, production datacenters, and cloud environments.

This patent defines the technology powering our unique approach to rapidly resolving software issues that can negatively impact a business’ bottom line. We are proud that our patented DVR-inspired approach is delivering real innovation, enabling complex applications to run more safely, securely and with less downtime.

Please click here to view the full press release.

Complexity in the software industry has sky-rocketed, and applications that once were versioned and released every six months are now being upgraded with new production code every couple of weeks. EBay is a prime example of this model. It is widely known that EBay has become so adept and addressing issues and deploying changes to their servers, that every two weeks a whole new version of Ebay is up and running in their multitude of data centers around the world.

Now, Ebay is not a simple application, and downtime at Ebay can cost millions of dollars, not to mention generate an angry mob of users who are not only desperately trying to buy the latest iPhone 3G, but some of whom are also trying to make their living. This is serious stuff. Downtime at Ebay is front page news.

It’s redundant to point out dangers of our new Software-as-a-Service software paradigm. However, the one-to-many relationship between application server and end-users does present a great deal of pitfalls that did not exist in Bill Gates’ world. When Microsoft Outlook crashes, you may be upset, say something not very nice, then restart it. When your application servers crash, money starts flowing straight out the back door as your customers all collectively say something not very nice about you.

So why aren’t more companies able to follow the Ebay model? What does Ebay know that they don’t?

The answer may lie not just in how they deploy new changes, but how they handle and resolve issues quickly when they do occur. Is this truly one the great remaining challenges in the realm of software? Some would say so, and they have good reasons to back them up.

Multi-tier applications represent some of the greatest levels of complexity ever seen in the software industry. With pieces of your application running on many heterogeneous, physically dispersed servers and environments, understanding what went wrong in these environments can be next to impossible.

When issues occur, most often the only hope a team has is to attempt to reproduce the same conditions that caused the error, and hope it happens again. This means that to understand the root-cause of issues, recreating the environment, re-populating the database, and generating the required load on the servers is the only solution. Frequently, the pain of going through this effort is too great, and the issues lie dormant… until the next time something bad happens!

What the software industry is screaming out for is the ability to quickly capture, reproduce, and isolate issues as they occur. What we need is something like ‘TiVo™ for Software’.

One solution that has finally emerged from the chaos introduces the concept of recording and replaying software execution. This technology revolves around the core ability to not only record an application’s execution, but just as importantly, the complex environment in which the application ran.

With this new ability, teams can dispense with massive amounts of inefficient workflows that have traditionally been manual, iterative and error prone.

Imagine this common scenario: Your newly out-sourced team in India is handling QA for your complex, multi-tier application. They’re doing a great job and have found over 100 issues with your application. You’ve got your problem reports, log files, and the very large database datasets that your application was using when the bad things happened.

Next comes the fun part.

Now it’s your turn to bring up the same environment that your Indian team was running. I hope you’re using virtual servers! Finally, let’s take a shot at generating the same load on our application that existed when the problem occurred. Hopefully, the moons have aligned, and your fingers are crossed…

Now let’s fast-forward to 2008. Your Indian team is using your recording system. You arrive in the morning, logon to your defect tracking system, load the recording of an issue they found, and press ‘play’.

This time, every event that affected your application in that complex environment, including output from your authentication, LDAP, caching and e-commerce servers, has all been recorded and stored. Even the database and its dataset are no longer required. Most importantly, the end-user traffic that ultimately triggered the problem to occur has been recorded as well. All of these elements are perfectly reproduced allowing you to focus on the most important thing: What went wrong.

Anyone who has been involved in software development can relate to the age-old conundrum of trying to reproduce an issue that simply doesn’t appear to exist. At least not on your machine. Too many sleepless nights have been wasted chasing down phantom bugs. It’s time for the madness to stop.

The problems we’re facing are only getting more and more complex as new technologies are brought to market. This new software paradigm is here to stay. Luckily, I believe new technologies such as record and replay will help control the chaos.

Webinar will discuss recording and replaying errors in:
- Spring & Hibernate Framework Web Applications
- WebLogic, WebSphere and Tomcat Applications
- Eclipse J2EE Development Environments

There will be a demonstration showing how application errors can be identified, isolated and passed onto members of Virtual Development Team for rapid bug replay and reproduction.

ReplayDIRECTOR™ functions like a DVR for applications by recording all inputs and events affecting your software while it is running, and providing the ability to replay exactly what happened. Defects can be reproduced immediately without the need to replicate the environment and conditions that the defect occurred in.

Speaker: Jonathan Lindo is co-founder and CEO of Replay Solutions, and is passionate about improving the way software is built and delivered. His research has resulted in numerous patent filings for technologies including high performance networking, application virtualization, and the record/replay of computer programs.

Register now by clicking here.

It feels like SaaS has been a story waiting to happen since around 1999. The network is the computer, thin clients with fat pipes, scaling servers, clustering, virtualization… Seems like all the pieces are in place, the cloud is up there. But still there are only a handful of winners that have really figured out the SaaS model, and a sea of also rans that got run over along the way.

Why?

Well, some of them were just plain bad ideas. Irrational exuberance and all that. But I think there is another big factor at play here. When you have these giant, sea change moments in the way that software is designed, built, shipped and supported, not to mention sold, you’d better have the tools and technology to support you along the way, otherwise it’s not going to be easy! In fact, it’s going to be hard. Really hard.

I could point you to a room full of ex-CEO’s who will attest to this fact. Whipping up your latest Web 2.0 mashup and putting it online is usually about 3% of the challenge. What happens when people actually start using it? Here’s where the rubber meets the road.

One of the essential elements of success is getting a solid, scalable application online and running smoothly and securely. But there just hasn’t been a lot of innovation here.

Being able to quickly identify, respond to and resolve issues in a SaaS application is critical, because if one server has a bad day, it’s not one customer that feels pain, it’s hundreds or thousands. And that’s bad. SaaS acts like a big hairy amplifier on any defect or scalability issue that might be lurking in your app.

Technologies like Introscope, Patrol, Vantage, Snort and my software debugging company Replay are starting to address the needs, but our customers are still pioneering and forging the landscape as they increasingly feel the pains of this new software paradigm we find ourselves in.

So great job, VMware, Amazon and Linus for getting us to this point where we finally can explore the dream of The Cloud. Now it’s up to companies like us to make SaaS applications manageable, cost effective, and safe as we keep things running up there 24/7 with less ‘unscheduled maintenance’!

As developers ourselves, we had become tired of watching release dates slip because critical bugs could not be fixed. We tackled this problem by focusing on eliminating the most time-consuming phase of the problem resolution process: recreating the defect.

Inspired by one of our favorite technologies – the DVR – our core technology focuses on simplifying problem resolution in all phases of the software lifecycle.

Replay Solutions accomplishes this by doing the difficult work of reproducing the root cause of any software defect, no matter how complex the original environment was. Our technology captures every input and event that can affect an application, and then replays these inputs and events in a virtual environment, eliminating the need to recreate the original environment.

Replay is a completely new approach to solving a problem that has plagued corporate IT for the last 30 years. Our technology has been designed from the ground up with an understanding of the importance of collaboration between teams, and the need to resolve problems quickly during all phases of the application lifecycle.