Univa UD, a leading provider of cloud management software, announced today it has been named a winner of the 2009 Virtualization Review Reader’s Choice Awards, with its market-leading Reliance product named #1 in Virtual Automation.

Reliance is a market-leading service governance product that intelligently automates virtual or physical resource provisioning, so application performance adheres to established policies. The product monitors the application infrastructure, gathers and analyzes detailed performance metrics, then takes provisioning actions based on these metrics to meet customer service-level agreements (SLAs).

For service providers in particular, Reliance is the essential core of a cloud-based environment. Reliance leverages cloud building blocks like virtual machines and infrastructure management tools, enabling companies to better utilize their resources by avoiding over- or under-provisioning infrastructure and prioritizing workload.

“We’re proud to receive this honor from those individuals in the best position to judge the quality of a virtual automation product – the end users,” said Jason Liu, president and CEO of Univa UD. “Reliance is the only product of its kind that can intelligently automate resource provisioning based on both infrastructure and application SLAs. Our top service provider and enterprise customers alike are choosing Reliance for exactly the capability we are being honored for: policy-based virtual automation.”

Over the past year, Univa has experienced tremendous growth with service providers and internal corporate IT organizations interested in using Reliance to power external and internal computing clouds. The company’s efforts were recognized by Virtualization Review readers, favoring Reliance 2 to 1 over the competition in the Virtual Automation category.

Conducted annually, Virtualization Review’s 2009 Reader's Choice Awards survey asks readers to vote for the best of the best in the world of virtualization. The voting process included decisions on more than 125 products in 11 categories, ranging from application virtualization to virtualization security, standards and training.