INTERCONNECTS

Avaki Corporation, a pioneer in commercial grid software solutions, today announced that it has signed a worldwide systems integration agreement with HP. Customers will now have available a scalable grid solution capable of solving real-world business problems. Under the terms of the agreement, HP Services will resell the recently announced AVAKI 2.5 grid software to its prospects and customers around the globe. The AVAKI grid software will be available with HP’s family of high-performance AlphaServer systems running Tru64 UNIX and industry-standard ProLiant servers running the Linux and Windows operating systems. AVAKI 2.5 is the industry’s only commercial, comprehensive grid solution providing secure, wide area access to data, processing power and application resources in a single, uniform operating environment. AVAKI's software simplifies the enormous complexity associated with accessing data and compute resources across geographically dispersed organizations, significantly reducing administrative burdens associated with managing distributed resources. Grid software is being used across several industries, with significant initial deployments in life sciences. Grids in Life Sciences AVAKI and HP have identified key problems that life sciences research and development organizations face – the need for secure access to fresh and consistent data, a uniform environment that is easy for researchers to use and for IT professionals to administer, and a highly available computing infrastructure that delivers maximum application performance and reliability. Grids pool heterogeneous data and compute resources across an enterprise, making them accessible on-demand. Specifically within the life sciences market, data that is critical to research and discovery tends to be distributed across multiple locations or is difficult to access, time-consuming and complicated to administer, and inconsistently named – leading to data that is often out of sync. AVAKI solves these problems by automating access to wide area data and making it appear local to those who have been granted access to it. At the same time, AVAKI guarantees consistency of the data across an organization or between multiple organizations, while providing access to the most recent data available. AVAKI’s grid solution enables organizations to make the most of an organization’s data resources and harnesses available computing power for compute-intensive or high throughput analyses critical to research and testing. “We’re pleased to work with HP on a comprehensive grid solution that meets the specific needs of customers,” said Tim Yeaton, AVAKI’s president. “Our unique grid software product provides HP customers with secure, wide-area access to data, applications and processing resources across domains, sites and platforms. In addition, AVAKI’s grid solution can act as a master scheduler, spanning multiple, heterogeneous, third party scheduling and queuing products.” The relationship with HP comes on the heels of AVAKI’s introduction of the latest version of its commercial grid software, AVAKI 2.5, which incorporates significant enhancements, including advanced caching mechanisms that increase data grid performance. These improvements provide wide-area data access with performance comparable to local area access, and reduce the administrative burdens on end-users and systems administrators. Unlike grid toolkits, which can require substantial custom development, AVAKI 2.5 is fully functional packaged software that is quick to deploy. "AVAKI has carved out an important position in the commercial data grid software market,” said Winston Prather, vice president of HP’s High Performance Technical Computing Division. “At HP, we’re seeing a growing demand for data grid solutions, particularly from our life sciences customers. Our new relationship with AVAKI underscores our commitment to provide our customers and prospects with an end-to-end commercial grid computing solution.” AVAKI’s software offering also is synergistic with the HP Utility Data Center, HP’s new self-healing, self-adapting programmable data center capability. This capability will enable customers using AVAKI’s environment to dynamically share the IT infrastructure with other applications.