Univa, the Data Center Workload Optimization Company, today announced the contribution of its Universal Resource Broker (URB) technology to the open-source community.

The Universal Resource Broker is a software solution that allows distributed application frameworks written for Apache Mesos to run seamlessly on Univa Grid Engine. Making URB available as an open-source project opens the door to continued innovation, enabling community contributors to build adapters to additional workload managers and application frameworks. In addition to open-sourcing the project, Univa is extending URB to support Kubernetes clusters as well.

By using URB, users have the option of deploying any Mesos compatible framework (including Spark, Hadoop, Storm, Jenkins, Marathon and Chronos) along with any other type of workload using Univa Grid Engine as an underlying workload management substrate for high performance and high throughput environments. Users can also choose to run URB on a variety of Kubernetes based cluster solutions in cases where containerized microservices are key. Enterprises requiring more powerful scheduling features and policy-based controls will want to select the combination of Navops Command, URB and Kubernetes with the additional option of Navops Command's Mixed Workload support for non-containerized applications run inside the Kubernetes environment.

According to Fritz Ferstl, CTO at Univa Corporation, "This is an important development for our large installed base of Grid Engine customers and for the burgeoning Kubernetes ecosystem. With the Universal Resource Broker, customers can easily deploy a single cluster supporting batch, interactive, containerized and now Mesos API driven workloads without contention. We're continuing to deliver on our promise to help customers achieve better business results on a more cost-efficient, shared infrastructure."

URB provides Kubernetes users with a seamless way to run application frameworks written for Mesos while protecting existing investments. The technology complements Univa's Navops Command, an advanced, enterprise-proven policy management solution for Kubernetes that supports mixed workloads. With URB and Navops Command, Univa supports the widest variety of container and non-container based application workloads on a shared Kubernetes environment.

"Open source software is critical in the modern application container ecosystem and market, where availability, flexibility and integration can be enhanced by open source software components and frameworks." said Jay Lyman, principal analyst for 451 Research. "Univa's URB also supports the variety of software - including big data, continuous integration and container management and orchestration technology - that is critical to success in enterprise IT today. "

"We are pleased to contribute this key technology to the open source community" said Rob Lalonde, General Manager of Univa's Navops business unit. "This contribution demonstrates our ongoing commitment to open source software and to helping organizations get the most from their infrastructure investments. We are very excited to extend the capabilities of URB to Kubernetes."

The open-source Universal Resource Broker for Grid Engine is expected to be available in July of 2017 and will be released under an Apache open-source license. URB for Kubernetes is planned for August of 2017 availability.