Univa announced a significant advancement in the migration of HPC workloads to the cloud with the release of Navops Launch 1.0, the latest version of the most powerful hybrid HPC cloud management product. Navops Launch meshes public cloud services and on-premise clusters to cost-effectively meet increasing workload demand.

The Navops Launch platform helps HPC organizations manage cloud spending and audit usage. This latest product uses an automation engine that integrates cluster and cloud management systems with end-user defined metrics to fully inform intelligent cloud workload placement actions. With Navops Launch, organizations can take advantage of the virtually unlimited scalability, lightning-fast cluster creation and the pay-per-use economics of hybrid HPC cloud computing with fully automated control of spending and policies.

Navops Launch automation tightly integrates with Univa Grid Engine and its workload status and metrics collection to respond to changes in workload demand and cluster utilization by expanding or contracting the cloud footprint in a dynamic fashion. Once configured, administrators have full control over tying cloud resource usage to a corresponding budget without having to intervene manually. Built-in monitors report the efficiency, use, spend and status of workloads placed in the cloud.

A unique automation engine allows Navops Launch to integrate third-party data sources, including storage fabric, management systems, cluster and cloud environment attributes. The use of these attributes can be tied together with application metrics via a series of automation applets to drive the insight into the scaling, data movement, cost decisions, workload placement policies and tear-down of instances. Crucial aspects of data locality and data movement can be automated with an applet, as well and tied to the requirements of workloads and storage architectures.

Among the new capabilities in Navops Launch is an intuitive web interface that makes it easy for cluster administrators to extend on-premise clusters to their choice of cloud. Navops Launch is designed to integrate into existing enterprise identity providers and interoperate with cloud authentication services. Meeting the demands of the enterprise cloud security team is simplified through integration with cloud networking, name resolution, firewall, VPN, VPC settings and support for "bring your own image" (BYOI) model that easily integrates existing cloud images into a Navops Launch-managed Univa Grid Engine environment. Built-in adapters exist for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OpenStack and VMware vSphere.

"Navops Launch 1.0 is a breakthrough release for our enterprise customers who are shifting workloads to the cloud," says Gary Tyreman, president and CEO of Univa. "It addresses the major concerns about cloud migration we hear most often from clients, including ease-of-use, security, cost and concerns about data locality and synchronization. Most importantly, it preserves customer investments in existing applications and operations, and it can be deployed quickly with minimal impact to existing environments."

"The new applet framework is particularly compelling for developers and cluster administrators," added Bill Bryce, VP of products at Univa. "Users can easily modify existing applets or write site-specific applets supporting their own business needs and have them blend seamlessly into the Navops Launch Web UI. We expect that ISVs, partners and customers will all want to take advantage of this functionality to create a more seamless experience for both administrators and end-users."

Navops Launch 1.0 has been proven in production enterprise hybrid cloud architectures and dozens of end-user validations in 2018. It is used in a variety of application environments, including HPC, enterprise analytics and scale-out machine learning/deep learning. Navops Launch also has built-in data collection and reporting so that customers can easily account for workload and resource usage on-premise and across multiple cloud platforms.