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HPC & AI Wall StreetIn today’s world of swiftly shortening time-to-market windows, an organizations’ ability to 
innovate and meet these windows of opportunity necessitates that they become indubitably dependent on technology. The core of this technology is the IT infrastructure that serves as valuable a purpose to end-users as the telephone cables and poles of the plain old telephone system (POTS) enables the dial tone we expect when we pick up a phone.
During tough times it is commonplace for an organization to save money by cutting budgets and postponing major expenses as long as possible. Against this reality it might seem unexpected to suggest that an organization invest in the modernization of a core and fundamental software component in its technical computing infrastructure. Indeed, such an investment can provide a high return while at the same time enhancing an organization’s research and design capabilities.
We have identified five key ways that Univa creates business value for our customers for a modest investment. By upgrading Grid Engine an organization can reduce downtime, boost its jobs per day throughput and find ways to manage application license costs to help meet the budget cut requirements in capital spending imposed by the reality of tough times.
1. Enterprise-grade Support
With Univa the availability and expertise of support is a given and it comes with a service-level guarantee, telephone support line and the ability to fix the issue that caused the problem in the first place.
As a customer, you don’t just get support when you need it from Univa. You gain access to our exclusive expertise in the scheduler, policies and best practices. Our customers regularly tap us for our knowledge and then apply it to their unique environment and configuration. Often this leads to customer requirements on our roadmap.
“If I went to another company that was using purely an open-source Grid Engine, I would take Univa with me to assure this kind of flexibility and security. I know Univa has my back.”
Katrina Montinola, Archimedes
Support is more than availability alone. The key piece of value – which we offer through subscription – for the core software technology is that we employ the experts who are the key contributors to more than 97% of that software. Therefore, we have the people with the know-how to put in the changes or fixes for you, when required.
With Univa Grid Engine you don’t need to be the expert in the resource manager. You are free to focus on pressing business needs.
2. Unique Performance Features
Performance of modern workload management systems can be defined many ways depending on the primary use and dependency on the system. For many Grid Engine users downtime is the most unacceptable situation. Univa views stability as the foundation of performance that enables the workload management system to maximize throughput. The stability found in Univa Grid Engine has allowed the design of unique features that extends performance to make Grid Engine perform better in the most demanding data centers. Simply put, Univa Grid Engine is the fastest and most stable version of Grid Engine ever.
“…the benefits are significant, especially in managing the risk the business is exposed to.”– Tata Steel
In addition, there are numerous functional improvements in Univa Grid Engine that increase throughput and reduce administration time including Job Classes, Small Job Support, Core & Non-Uniform Memory Access (Numa) Binding support in the master and improved debugging and diagnostics that will cut 90% of the time that it would have taken with open source Grid Engine to determine why jobs fail.
3. Gain Insight through Analytics
Univa bundles UniSight, a Reporting and Analytics tool, that allows organizations to measure, track and chargeback usage on Univa Grid Engine clusters. UniSight provides organizations with the insight they need to make better decisions.
Armed with the knowledge from the reports, companies can reduce spending, ensure investments are delivering value, and make truly informed IT strategy and budget decisions.
4. Manage Licenses
Most Grid Engine users have long desired to manage application licenses as a resource with confidence and at scale. Often only monitoring license usage or using custom home-grown scripts was the primary solution. Until now that is.
Univa License Orchestrator prioritizes the sharing of limited and expensive application license features according to business objectives by incorporating availability into Univa Grid Engine scheduling decisions. Univa License Orchestrator enables maximum workload throughput for users, groups or projects with flexible sharing policies and simple configuration bringing administration efficiency.
Improving the efficiency of expensive application licenses provides immediate and measurable value and savings to an organization.
5. Share with Hadoop
As Big Data technologies enter the enterprise, they must coordinate and integrate with existing systems management best practices in the data center. While benefits from Big Data applications are immense they can be quickly undermined with poor utilization when deployed as a stand-alone system with the inability to share resources.
Univa offers a range of benefits to Big Data applications by integrating Hadoop into the Grid Engine cluster. A shared infrastructure reduces the costs of deploying Hadoop by up to 50%, while the inherited policy-driven scheduling increases utilization and control.
Univa’s support for dynamic and multiple instances of Hadoop and other applications on a shared cluster drives up utilization, and that saves money.
Automation products like Univa Grid Engine drive the overall efficiency of expensive compute and data infrastructure, which in turn makes the users more productive and that is the recipe for innovation and a roadmap to meet the rapidly shortening time-to-market windows. These five ways to create value make Univa Grid Engine an investment with a quick ROI.
Try it for yourself. Download our FREE Trial and take the product – and Univa’s expert support – for a spin.
For a complete list of benefits please read the product page or read the release notes which can be found here
Related Articles:
TATA Steel Automotive Engineering Depends on Univa: TATA Steel Automotive Engineering’s concern grew when open source Grid Engine support and development was discontinued by Oracle.
Reduce Hadoop Operational Cost by 50 Percent: A case study about how Archimedes put Hadoop in production for less with Grid Engine.
BioIT World Webinar: Have you cracked the genetic code to sharing? Join Archimedes Inc and Univa as they explore shared infrastructures including Hadoop in production.
Grid Engine Release Update: Read what’s new in our 26th development release in 18 months
