Librato, Inc., a provider of data center utilization software, announced a new product that enables the safe suspension of an application, relinquishing all shared resources consumed by that application to run a higher priority job. Librato Smart Suspend, the vendor said, requires no application or OS modification, and integrates with popular queuing systems such as Platform LSF. Smart Suspend is an application-agnostic job preemption product that can suspend running applications and free critical shared resources, including application licenses, to improve server utilization.

"In the current economy, increasing utilization-doing more with what you already have-and being able to defer CAPEX [capital expenses] and OPEX [operating expenses] is pretty critical to companies and in fact it is vital to their business health," John Wernke, vice president of marketing for Librato, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

In most computing environments, IT organizations must preempt lower priority jobs to accommodate higher priority ones. Traditionally job preemption is done by terminating the lower-priority job, resulting in wasted resources and scarce compute cycles. Another approach is to temporarily suspend the job. However, with this approach the suspended job is still holding onto system resources and application licenses that are then unavailable to high-priority jobs, Librato says.

Smart Suspend provides job preemption, preserving already completed work. When a low priority job is suspended, all related resources such as CPU, memory and application licenses are immediately relinquished, enabling a higher priority job to take advantage of these resources. After the higher priority job is completed, the lower priority job can be resumed from its suspension point by automatically reacquiring its system resources and the application license. "You can resume the job right from where it was, without wasting any of those CPU cycles that had already been used, get the licenses back, get the memory back, and then proceed forward," Wernke says.

For more information, including pricing, go to the Librato website.