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Univa Data Centre Automation Company and home of Grid Engine has announced the release of License Orchestrator to provide license management through Univa Grid Engine, the most widely deployed, distributed resource management software platform today. Reducing the operating costs of IT departments, Univa’s latest solution adds essential planning tools, such as reports on license usage, to maximize a company’s budget spent on software licenses. Built by the creators of Grid Engine, with License Orchestrator you can expect the same robust, enterprise-grade and scalable product as all Univa solutions.

“Companies invest large portions of their budget on expensive software tools without the means to ensure that these critical assets are being used optimally and getting into the hands of those who need it most,” said Gary Tyreman, CEO, Univa. “In the highly competitive business environments of today, going to market quickly is paramount. License Orchestrator provides that speed through an integrated, scalable and flexible approach to managing key software licenses.”

License Orchestrator enables companies to define rules, such as number of users, quotas or license sharing entitlements, to prioritize access to limited and expensive software license features according to mission critical projects. Designed for the modern enterprise, Univa’s new product is highly scalable and operates across geographically dispersed sites without any impact on performance. License Orchestrator enables companies to optimize the investment of enterprise software license fees by centralizing all software license activity on multiple Univa Grid Engine clusters and external applications.

License Orchestrator key features include:

• Seamless integration with existing IT systems for easy deployment and data collection necessary for license optimization. Out of the box connectivity with Flexera™ FlexNet Publisher.
• License prioritization for different user groups and groups paired with the intelligence to obtain licenses from a non-critical project or remote site to better meet critical project deadlines.
• Consolidated view through real-time collection of FlexNet Publisher license information providing IT with consolidated and consistent view of all licenses in a single pane of glass.
• Governance and reporting providing insight into license usage patterns allowing IT administrators to better forecast future license spend.

Univa Grid Engine 8.1.5 Updates:

Simultaneously, Univa has announced the latest Univa Grid Engine version 8.1.5 which includes support for License Orchestrator, bug fixes and improvements in performance & configurability. The latest version will also offer Mac OS X support, enabling Univa Grid Engine to run proficiently on the latest version of Mac operating systems.

Univa has built a series of very valuable products that enhance the value of Grid Engine. These form the Univa product suite, with License Orchestrator as the latest addition. Univa has developed the industry’s most powerful and integrated solution suite for mission-critical enterprise technical computing and Big Data applications. License Orchestrator is available today and is accessible after upgrading to Univa Grid Engine 8.1.5.

In other Univa news, Grid Engine is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

“It is rare for a particular piece of software to last for 20 years and even rarer for it to stay so close to its original roots,” said Gary Tyreman, CEO, Univa. “Since taking over the management of Grid Engine, Univa has singlehandedly delivered over 525 improvements, including our latest 8.1.5 release. Grid Engine has been vital to how enterprise data centers operate today and, considering the advances made today with Grid Computing, I look forward to the next 20 years.”

Grid computing has emerged out of distributed computing which was born two decades ago with Grid Engine in Germany. It is considered to be the most important evolution from the distributed but unrelated and uncooperative supercomputer to modern computing infrastructure in the enterprise. Today the use of grid computing has crossed over many industries, and its popularity continues to grow. Grid Engine, a distributed resource management software, was created 20 years ago in order to maximize the utility of computing clusters by sharing and prioritizing resources to applications and people that need them the most.

“Without Grid Computing, we wouldn’t have the Cloud today and we can all attest to how revolutionary that has been,” said Fritz Ferstl, CTO of Univa Corporation and father of Grid Engine and its forerunners. “The grid was instrumental in teaching us how to build systems that share and has continuously evolved and been at the forefront of many pivotal events, changing how we do business and view the world. Even as computing has evolved over the last 20 years, it is testament to the roots of Grid Engine and Grid Computing that they still remain so pivotal today.”

Grid Engine found its beginning in HPC and University research facilities, but today it has evolved to become a vital mission-critical software in the modern enterprise data center. By enabling organizations to manage large numbers of computations, grid computing and Grid Engine now touches such industries as healthcare, genomics, oil & gas, safety, weather prediction, industrial design & manufacturing, crew & fleet scheduling, and electronic design. Pertinent to the future of computing, is the ability for Grid Engine to enable a Big Data infrastructure more efficiently and with up to 50% cost-savings on Hadoop deployment. Most notably, grid computing made it possible for researchers at the Large Hadron Collider of the European Center for Nuclear Science (CERN) to share data and discover the Higgs boson particle, one of the most important discoveries in particle physics.

Today Univa Grid Engine’s team is largely comprised of long time Grid Engine developers, including Fritz Ferstl, who conceived and designed the original Grid Engine at Genias, later Gridware, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems. With their legacy of Grid Engine knowledge, the Univa Grid Engine team continuously advances Grid Engine with an average of one fix per day. Univa Grid Engine is engineered, tested, and globally supported by Univa.