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Today, Avaki Corporation (www. avaki .com), a leader in commercial grid software solutions, unveiled Avaki Data Grid 3.0, the industry's first Java-based data grid software for commercial enterprise IT environments. Built on J2EE for ease of deployment and integration, Avaki Data Grid 3.0 provides secure, wide-area access to consistent, current data with breakthrough reductions in infrastructure complexity and cost. Avaki 's grid technology is already being deployed by customers that are realizing the return on investment of an Avaki grid through secure, wide-area access to IT resources. With the launch of Avaki Data Grid, Avaki is expanding beyond traditional high performance computing grid users to address the data access challenges faced by enterprise IT organizations across multiple industries, including life sciences, manufacturing, and oil and gas. "By providing 'data grid' technology, Avaki is addressing a number of important requirements for future computing environments. Data grids work to connect organizationally and geographically diverse users, files, and databases through a coherent network-wide data infrastructure. We see data grids as potentially fulfilling users' requirements in such areas as: improving the transparency of access to data and compute resources, developing collaborative computing environments, and increasing data consistency and availability," said Debra Goldfarb, group vice president, Worldwide Systems and Servers, IDC. " Avaki 's approach to the market differs from 'compute grid' implementations that concentrate on optimizing existing resources and providing large parallel computing resources." Unlike traditional data access approaches that often require substantial hardware and software investments, Avaki Data Grid creates a federated data service that securely serves data from existing sources to users and applications over a wide-area, leaving the data in place. With Avaki Data Grid, companies eliminate costly organizational and technical barriers while creating a flexible, standards-based access infrastructure that scales to meet business requirements. Avaki Data Grid 3.0 is available as a standalone offering, or bundled with Avaki 's Compute Grid 2.6 software for organizations that want a comprehensive grid that allows the sharing of data and processing power. " Avaki is the first company to deliver the power of grid technology as a standards-based enterprise application," said Tim Yeaton, Avaki president. "With the introduction of the industry's first J2EE data grid product, we're tackling wide-area data access challenges in an even more effective way, for a broader range of customers." Avaki Data Grid 3.0 Meets Critical IT Challenges Avaki Data Grid can be applied to a range of data access challenges including wide-area access to distributed data, multi-company data access for efficient and secure partner collaboration and delivering distributed data for remote processing. -- Wide-area access to distributed data. Avaki Data Grid supplies consistent, current data to users, applications and business processes within or across locations, eliminating the cost and effort associated with storing and managing local data copies. -- Multi-company data access for efficient partner collaboration. Avaki Data Grid provides a secure, rapidly-deployed, low-investment way to share data across organizations in a manner consistent with business relationships, helping companies collaborate with partners, implement joint ventures or integrate acquisitions. -- Distributed data for remote processing. Avaki Data Grid enables the delivery of widely distributed data sets to applications running on compute grids, clusters, or centralized servers - without compromising throughput. Avaki Data Grid Captures Strong Industry Support Avaki has established strong relationships with a host of industry leaders including HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems. Today, all three voiced support for Avaki 's new offering. "As the first company to have a worldwide systems integration agreement with Avaki , HP is pleased to team with Avaki to provide industry-leading solutions, such as Avaki Data Grid, that address our mutual customers' diverse data access and collaboration problems," said Winston Prather, HP's vice president of High Performance Technical Computing. "The demand for data grid solutions is growing, and our relationship with Avaki underscores our commitment to provide our customers with comprehensive end-to-end commercial solutions." " Avaki is one of the companies leading the charge in bringing grids to the broader enterprise market, and we're pleased that they're embracing OGSA standards with the release of Avaki Data Grid 3.0," said Dan Powers, vice president, Grid strategy for IBM. " Avaki Data Grid 3.0 helps to solve distributed data access and collaboration problems, is based on enterprise IT standards and is a great example of how the grid community is using the OGSA standard to build practical IT solutions." " Avaki has made an important advancement in grid technology with the introduction of Avaki Data Grid 3.0. We expect that their commitment to the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition technology will help fuel the adoption of grid technologies within the larger enterprise community," said Steve MacKay, vice president of N1 and Management Systems at Sun Microsystems. "Sun's vision of N1 is to enable the provisioning of compute, storage and network resources on demand as requirements change, and we see Avaki Data Grid as a complimentary solution in a common strategy to bring efficiency and responsiveness to enterprise information technology." CIOs: Managing More Complexity with Fewer Resources Today's IT decision makers are faced with increasing levels of complexity within their organizations, as well as the need to increase productivity for end-users and administrators within smaller budget envelopes. Charged with improving resource utilization and reliability, removing barriers to productivity and accelerating secure cross-company collaboration, IT decision makers are struggling to build or buy a solution that tackles all their data access problems. To date, organizations have had to use a combination of homegrown approaches to manage data access, including file transfer protocol (FTP), replication, demilitarized zones (DMZs) and virtual private networks (VPNs). With Avaki Data Grid, organizations have a software-based data access solution that requires less storage and administration; is non-disruptive to users, applications, and data; deploys rapidly; and is built on enterprise standards to integrate easily with existing systems. By eliminating the need for replication infrastructures and the associated data management effort, Avaki Data Grid reduces infrastructure complexity and cost while providing the organization with a more uniform access control mechanism. " Avaki Data Grid 3.0 software will speed up our daily work by providing a single point of entry to distributed data through standard network protocols. We use many systems that provide files as output, so this capability will have a major impact on our research. Developers find Avaki 's architecture straightforward and intuitive, and are especially pleased with the Java-based technology. It's easy to see that with Avaki Data Grid 3.0 we can cut development time and integrate new data stores quickly," said Brian Gilman, Group Leader Medical and Population Genetics Department, Whitehead Institute for Genomic Research. AVAKI Data Grid 3.0 Key Features -- Federated data. Avaki Data Grid federates data objects from multiple locations and data stores, providing users with a unified view of and unified access to data. The data stays where it is, remaining under the control of local administrators. In addition, data owners establish access controls based on business policies, providing users with access to all the data they need - and only the data they need. -- Federated users. Avaki Data Grid federates user and group identities across locations or departments, eliminating the need for VPN-based access strategies in which remote users must have accounts on several systems in order to access data. Avaki Data Grid integrates with directory services (i.e., LDAP-based or Network Information Service (NIS) directories), simplifying administration of users. -- Automated data caching. Avaki Data Grid makes remote access practical, enabling organizations to store and manage data in one place and serve data from a single source to all users and applications. The result is consistent, current data for everyone who needs it. -- Enterprise standard solution. Avaki Data Grid deploys quickly on existing infrastructures. Applications can use the Avaki Data Grid with no modification. A Java/J2EE foundation with support for multiple platforms and a variety of industry standards means easy integration with existing IT infrastructures. Avaki is also committed to OGSA, the emerging industry standard for grids. Pricing and Availability Avaki Data Grid 3.0 is available immediately. Pricing starts at the workgroup level and scales for enterprise-wide deployments. More information about Avaki Corporation and its solutions is available on the Web at www. avaki .com. Global Launch Webcast Avaki is hosting a global launch Webcast today beginning at 2:00 EST. In addition to Avaki Data Grid product demonstrations, the Webcast will include commentary from Avaki CTO and founder, Dr. Andrew Grimshaw, and Avaki president, Tim Yeaton, as well as an interactive Q&A session. The Webcast can be accessed at avakievents.webex.com, and will be rebroadcast live at 2:00 EST on December 12 and 17.