The top 10 tech startups for 2008

Hot tech startup: Cohesive Flexible Technologies

Founded: 2006

Tech breakthrough: Software that builds a base image of a server and reformats it into a chosen virtualization configuration without first building a physical server.

Business problem addressed: How to manage and quickly deploy servers in a complex environment.

What the technology does: Patrick Kerpan, CTO of Cohesive Flexible Technologies, calls it the "more of everything problem." He notes, "Open source, open standards, virtualization, SOA and clouds are proliferating, needing countless components. An enterprise in the financial sector may have as many as 100 different application stacks." CohesiveFT's Elastic Server On Demand assembles virtual machines and deploys them to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or creates an implementation of major virtualization formats including EMC VMware, Citrix XenSource, and Parallels. CohesiveFT claims that a deployment can be completed in hours or even minutes. Using CohesiveFT's management system, IT can then track the deployed component assemblies throughout their lifecycle and log all configuration changes. The server can later be provisioned to another platform.

How the technology works: The company maintains libraries of components, including those from the open source community and software vendors. Customers may add their own proprietary components to the library (for their use only) and construct the image of a virtual application stack. The resulting images are built, encapsulated, given a unique identity and injected with management and integration services. CohesiveFT calls the completed stack an "elastic server." CohesiveFT uses an add-on to OpenVPN (open source virtual private network) that can connect multiple servers (both physical and virtual) located in various datacenters and hosted at different providers into a single address space.

Forward spin: At the moment, Amazon's EC2 is the only cloud with a direct connection to CohesiveFT, but expect to see more clouds supported fairly soon, Kerpan says. The company also plans to add management tools as well as support for virtual Linux.