Univa Cloud Management Products Now Support Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

📅 February 8, 2010 - Allows flexible usage of cloud computing capacity with user-driven, policy-managed pricing.

Univa UD, a provider of cloud management software, today announced that its UniCloud and Grid MP products now support Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, enabling users to reduce public cloud computing costs by essentially setting their own price for the resources they wish to consume.

The company explains that Spot Instances are a new way to purchase and consume Amazon EC2 Instances. They allow customers to bid on Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids meet or exceed the price gain access to available Spot Instances. It adds that Spot Instances complement On-Demand and Reserved Instances, providing another option for obtaining compute capacity.

The company says that UniCloud is a cloud management software product for HPC and technical computing, enabling organizations to build and access dynamic cloud computing environments. With UniCloud, application users can manage physical and virtual infrastructures in scale and achieve an unprecedented level of both application and cloud mobility. It claims that UniCloud makes it easy to on-board an organization or application into a cloud environment, and enables policy management based on established service level agreements or requirements.

"This is a win for our customers, and serves to solidify Univa's position in enabling HPC in the cloud," said Gary Tyreman, SVP of products and alliances at Univa UD. "Spot Instances provide an option for auction-style computing where UniCloud or Grid MP users can bid for capacity in the Amazon EC2 cloud. This will drive down costs through competition while enabling a dynamic computing option for customers whose use cases are flexible enough to take advantage of this opportunistic model."

"Thanks to UniCloud's policy-enabled decision-making, Spot Instances users can leverage Amazon EC2 when their price point is met," said Tyreman. "The UniCloud policy engine determines where it's cheapest to run workloads and when to move a job to a less expensive resource or add capacity to a cluster if the price is right. Not only can Spot Instance users establish their top price, they can automate the decision to use this option when it makes economic sense."

"At Univa we've built our products to address the key capabilities required to be successful in cloud," said Bill Bryce, Director of Product Development at Univa UD. "Among our core design principles are the concepts of scalability, dynamism, extensibility, integration, multi-tenancy, and heterogeneity. Now, with support for Amazon Spot Instances, we're taking our cloud management suite to the next level by expanding the available resources to our customer's and, at the same time, giving them new options for policy-enabled decision-making based on economic factors."

"With Amazon EC2 Spot Instances we're bringing the benefits of cloud computing to a broader range of customers and use cases," said Terry Wise, Director of Business Development for Amazon Web Services. "We are excited that Univa UD is supporting Spot Instances with UniCloud. End users will now benefit from having greater access to computing capacity with a more flexible cost structure."

"The Amazon Spot Instances program delivers new levels of flexibility and value not found in other clouds. Yet, to help leverage these benefits, cloud users benefit from automation provided by Univa," said Paul Burns, President at Neovise. "With this announcement Univa is offering advanced levels of policy-based automation that take advantage of fluctuations in the price of Amazon EC2 compute resources. This is a valuable capability from Univa and is a smart way to leverage the public cloud."