Univa Ships Beta Release of Enterprise Globus Software

CHICAGO, Dec. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Univa Corporation today announced the beta release of Univa Globus Enterprise (UGE) Release 4.0, the first shipment of its enterprise-ready, commercially supported software based on the Globus(R) Toolkit, the industry's most widely deployed open source grid infrastructure software. UGE includes new, simplified installers and security configurations that facilitate rapid deployment of enterprise grids. General availability of UGE is expected in early 2006.

UGE builds on the broad range of functionality offered by the open source Globus Toolkit within the research and e-science communities and adds new features that deliver the simplicity, robustness and support demanded of commercial infrastructure software. Based on the latest 4.0 release of the Globus Toolkit, UGE provides a core set of services that can be deployed and integrated into enterprise solutions based on commodity hardware and software.

UGE supports data management and execution services across a grid of hundreds or thousands of computing, storage and network devices. It allows resources to be shared securely across multiple sites; enables distributed data to be moved and replicated; facilitates distributed execution services across multiple job schedulers and workload managers; and provides monitoring information for managing the grid.

"UGE is designed to help businesses deploy business-critical applications and services, while incurring lower capital and operating costs through effective use of IT assets," said Univa CEO and Globus Co-Founder, Steve Tuecke. "By using open source-based UGE, enterprises can eliminate the risk of vendor lock-in as they move toward a more dynamic IT infrastructure, while taking advantage of commercial support and services provided by Univa and its channel partners."

UGE is targeted at a broad range of applications in industries such as financial services, oil and gas, manufacturing and government. UGE addresses the needs of geographically-dispersed organizations that want to optimize storage, compute, and network resources both within and beyond the corporate data center.

In typical enterprise IT environments, companies often deploy applications on multiple, isolated grids throughout the enterprise and fail to address the complex issues associated with the large, distributed data sets that accompany these applications. This results in costly computing environments that are difficult to manage, preventing effective collaboration across these distributed enterprises.

By deploying UGE software, organizations can unite distributed environments to securely share information, applications and resources across multiple data centers, while also building the foundation for an IT infrastructure that scales to meet the demands of next generation data centers.

IBM, a long-time provider of open, standards-based Globus software, is licensing the company's first release, furthering adoption of grid computing within commercial organizations. More than 1,000 sites worldwide, including the TeraGrid project, use Globus software to access more than 40,000 CPUs and 10,000 terabytes of storage, making it the most widely-deployed open source grid infrastructure software on the market.

UGE Release 4.0 supports Linux and Unix running on x86, and IBM pSeries, zSeries and BladeCenter platforms. Univa offers UGE on an annual subscription basis. UGE Release 4.0 beta is available today and is supported by Univa's broad array of consulting services. General availability is scheduled for early 2006. For more information, go to http://www.univa.com/products/. About Univa

Univa is the leading provider of commercial software, technical support, and professional services for Grid infrastructure based on open source Globus software. Founded in 2004 by the creators of Globus, Univa works with leading enterprises and channel partners, including independent software and IT vendors, and systems integrators, to deliver Grid solutions to Global 1000 corporations. Univa is a privately held company based in Chicago. For more information, please visit http://www.univa.com. Media Contact: Sarah Conway

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