Unbound Compute for Enterprise Java

The era of unbound compute has arrived. Azul Systems™ has pioneered the industry's first network attached processing solution designed to unbound compute resources for Java™, J2EE™ and other virtual machine based applications. Without any application level modifications, binary compatibility requirements or operating system dependencies, this fundamental new approach eliminates capacity planning at the application level and dramatically lowers the cost and complexity associated with the traditional delivery of computing resources.

Application development has fundamentally changed

The manner in which applications are being developed has fundamentally changed.Legacy applications built in C/C++ are giving way to modern eBusiness and web-based applications written in object oriented languages like Java and .NET and executed in virtual machines. Gartner estimates that before the end of 2008, more than 80% of all new eBusiness application development will be based on virtual machines (J2EE or .NET).



The explosive growth of web services and service-oriented architectures (SOA) has led to a large scale proliferation of server infrastructure to support these application development projects. Managing and maintaining these applications has become more challenging and costly every year as more applications are brought on-line and legacy applications evolve and are migrated to these modern platforms.

Unbound Compute for Enterprise Applications

Traditional systems architectures were built on the premise of minimizing single-threaded latency and not for the inherently parallel architecture characteristic of application server and virtual machine platforms. As a result, the need for reliable, predictable, flexible and scalable compute infrastructures to drive these new business applications has become a business imperative - and driving the demand for network attached processing.

Delivery through Compute Pools

Network attached processing is a fundamentally new approach to delivering processing power analogous to the historical precedent set in both the networking and storage markets and is designed for simple integration into existing operating environments through three unique technologies:



Transformational Compute. Shattering Economics.

Network attached processing provides massively, scalable shared compute capacity that can dynamically respond to changing workloads and is designed for simple integration with today's leading application server deployments including IBM® WebSphere®, BEA® WebLogic® and JBoss™ platforms.

By simply plugging Azul compute appliances into an existing network, customers will see dramatic improvements in performance and significant reduction in the ongoing maintenance costs associated with managing thousands of servers.

At the Core of the Industry's First
Operating System-Agnostic Server Architecture

Azul compute appliances support heterogeneous environments, typically characterized by a mix of server platforms, operating systems and management tools. Based on innovative multicore silicon technology, this is the industry's first server architecture that does not expose its binaries to end user applications and is designed with hardware-assist features including pauseless garbage collection, optimistic thread concurrency, fine-grained thread synchronization and numerous other enhancements that optimize this platform for virtual machine-based software environment. Each compute appliance contains up to 384 processor cores and 256 gigabytes of coherent shared memory in a fully symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) system.

Azul Compute Appliances can host hundreds of applications simultaneously, provide dynamic access to additional compute resources to address peak application loads, while guaranteeing both minimum compute levels. Such power offers enterprise customers unprecedented application scalability at the best possible economics, while providing an ideal platform to accelerate the consolidation of applications and their associated server infrastructure. Azul compute appliances are transparently deployed into a customer's infrastructure without adding any additional points of failure or an architectural leap of faith.

Delivering Utility Computing - Now.

The notion of buying processing power in denominations of 2-way, 4-way, 8,16, etc. is migrating to the adoption of industry trends and initiatives like Utility Computing and On-Demand. The systems vendors driving these initiatives have intended to solve the inefficiencies and cost and complexity around managing enterprise-class data centers by delivering hardware, software and compute capacity resources on a pay per usage model or service. The challenge in realizing the benefits of these initiatives often creates tremendous increase in cost, requires significant architectural changes and forces customers into making highly vendor specific operating system and platform choices; plus, it will take years for customers to realize these visions. Network attached processing is a risk-free, differentiated approach that offers customers the right compute capacity for the way their applications are developed and is delivering on this vision - now.

The reemergence of innovation

Possibly one of the most compelling concepts around network attached processing is the amount of new opportunities this opens up for application innovation. No longer will application development efforts be constrained by server infrastructure limitations, but rather will finally be tied to business goals and objectives. This new era of creativity will also surely illustrate the advanced capabilities of leading vendor tools. Unbound compute is destined to spark a new era - one that is being kicked off by the reemergence of innovation.

Copyright © 2005, Azul Systems

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