Univa UD's UniCloud and Grid MP to Support Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

By Shamila Janakiraman

TMCnet Contributor

 

Univa (News - Alert) UD, a provider of cloud management software, announced that its UniCloud and Grid MP products will now support Amazon EC2 Spot Instances.

 

This is expected to help users reduce public cloud computing costs as they can now set their own price for the resources they want to consume.

 

“Thanks to UniCloud’s policy-enabled decision-making, Spot Instances users can leverage Amazon EC2 when their price point is met,” said Gary Tyreman, senior vice president of products and alliances at Univa UD. “This is a win for our customers, and serves to solidify Univa’s position in enabling HPC in the cloud.”

 

 “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,” Tyreman added.

 

Spot Instances enable the purchase and consumption of Amazon EC2 Instances. They will also allow customers to bid on Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances till their bid exceeds the current Spot Price.

 

Also the Spot Price changes according to the supply and demand and in case the customers’ bidding meets or exceeds the price gain then they will have access to available Spot Instances. Spot Instances complement On-Demand and Reserved Instances which will offer an option for reaching compute capacity.

 

UniCloud’s policy-enabled decision-making allows Spot Instances users to benefit from Amazon EC2 when their price point is met. The UniCloud policy engine can detect where it is 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. Spot Instance users can easily establish their top price and also automate the decision to use this option when the benefit will be more.

 

Terry Wise, director of Business Development for Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) added that Amazon EC2 Spot Instances is providing the benefits of cloud computing to more customers for various purposes. Univa UD’s support for Spot Instances with UniCloud will help end users benefit from greater access to computing capacity cost effectively, Wise added.