Data center optimization tool provider Univa revealed Jan. 19 that the principal engineers from the Sun/Oracle Grid Engine team, including Grid Engine founder and original project owner Fritz Ferstl, have left Oracle and are joining the company.
As a result, Univa will now offer engineering support for current Oracle Grid Engine deployments and will release a new Univa version of Grid Engine before the end of the first quarter of 2011.
Oracle Grid Engine software is a distributed resource management (DRM) system that manages the distribution of users’ workloads to the best available compute resources within the system. While compute resources in a typical data center have utilization rates that average only 10 percent to 25 percent, the Oracle Grid Engine can help a company increase utilization to 80, 90 or even 95 percent, Oracle said.
This significant improvement comes from the intelligent distribution of workload to the most appropriate available resources.
When users submit their work to Oracle Grid Engine as jobs, the software monitors the current state of all resources in the cluster and is able to assign these jobs to the best-suited resources. Oracle Grid Engine gives administrators both the flexibility to accurately model their computing environments as resources and to translate business rules into policies that govern the use of those resources, Oracle said.
“Combining the Grid Engine and Univa technology offerings was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that the new Univa EMEA team and I just couldn’t miss,” Ferstl said. “Now we’ll be able to interact with and serve users worldwide investigating and understanding their data center optimization needs.”
Lisle, Ill.-based Univa will concentrate on improving the Grid Engine for technical computing and HPC use cases in addition to promoting the continuity of the Grid Engine open-source community, Univa said.
Like Oracle’s, Univa’s products are used by Global 2500 companies.
An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment.
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