Home > Company > FAQs
Contact Us
Email Page
Print Page
FAQs
Corporate FAQs
General Questions |
||||||
Who is Azul Systems? » What are the drivers behind the Azul vision? » What business problem is Azul trying to solve? » Who are your target customers? » Where does Azul Systems have offices? » Who are your partners? Have you signed any resellers? »
What is network attached processing? » What distinct advantages does network attached processing offer? » |
||||||
Azul Systems is a global provider of enterprise server appliances that delivers compute and memory resources to Java™ based-applications as a shared network service. Our family of Azul Compute Appliances enables transparent, massively scalable infrastructure that supports the business priorities of today’s most demanding enterprise environments and delivers increased capabilities, capacity and utilization at a fraction of the cost of traditional computing models. What are the drivers behind the Azul vision? » Match system architecture to today's application development realities. What business problem is Azul trying to solve? » Azul is committed to helping businesses improve the profitability of their web services and Java-based applications by simplifying scalability, ensuring consistently low response times and dramatically lowering administration and data cost and complexity. Azul is addressing the growing demand for compute power for transaction-intensive applications and services with a fundamentally better approach called network attached processing. This appliance-based approach delivers compute capacity and memory as a shared network service, similar to the manner in which network attached storage provides shared storage capacity to datacenters. Network attached processing enables more predictable service levels, higher reliability, reduced power and energy costs all while dramatically lowering management cost and complexity. Who are your target customers? » Our focus is enterprise and web service-based businesses with large Java application footprints that require consistent, fast response times for high volumes of transactions. These customers span many sectors including financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, Web 2.0, and hospitality. Customers include Credit Suisse, LimeWire, Circuit City, and many more. Where does Azul Systems have offices? » Azul Systems has headquarters in Mountain View, CA, with field offices in Tokyo and London, and a development center in Bangalore, India. Who are your partners? Have you signed any resellers? » Azul has gained significant traction with many world-class systems integrators ISVs and infrastructure providers who serve the most demanding customers in the market. Azul has signed partnerships with over 20 technology partners including BEA, Oracle and JBoss, which include agreed upon licensing and certification agreements. Additionally, Azul has partnered with IBM Global Services for field support in the U.S. Reseller partners in Japan include ITOCHU TECHNO-SCIENCE Corporation, Nissho Electronics, and Sumisho Electronics. Morse, Ltd represents Azul in the UK and World IT Systems in Poland. Azul Compute Appliances are complementary technologies to most traditional server deployments, virtualization solutions and grid technologies. There are no direct competitors to Azul, just less efficient means of scaling large applications. Traditional application scaling models such as horizontal (scale out) or vertical (scale up) scaling models are no longer delivering the value they once did due to the tremendous growth of new applications and services which are putting further burden on datacenter budgets and real estate, power and cooling constraints. Traditional server architectures are not designed for the highly multi-threaded and garbage collected nature of today’s transaction-intensive, Java based-applications. This evidences itself in spreading large applications across lots of low-utilized servers or partitions in order to avoid application response time problems and to be able to accommodate spikes in workload. Azul Compute Appliances allow customers to consolidate instances with each doing significantly more work, eliminate application pauses and ensure that spikes are easily accommodated. This allows the customer to dramatically reduce the server footprint large applications require and realize utilization improvements of 300 to 500 percent.Azul Systems is well funded by some the world’s most respected venture capital partners and investment banks including Accel Partners, Austin Ventures, ComVentures, Redpoint Ventures and Worldview Technology Partners as well as Meritech Capital Partners and Credit Suisse.
What is network attached processing? » An appliance-based computing model that provides Java applications with a centralized pool of processor and memory resources that allow these applications to scale massively, handle significantly larger workloads and do so with consistently low response times. Azul Compute Appliances are installed as a shared service on the network, much as NAS or SAN storage resources are today, and multiple applications from heterogeneous host can transparently tap into the appliances all at once. What distinct advantages does network attached processing offer? » Network attached processing gives each application tapping into the appliance exactly the amount of resources it needs, the moment it needs them. Each application can access as much memory as needed – far beyond the typical 2GB limit of traditional servers and processors are dynamically allocated to the applications as their demand warrants. Processor allocation and reallocation occurs every 10 milliseconds ensuring that resources respond to workload changes immediately so spikes are easily accommodated. This ensures that your critical Java-based applications always deliver fast response times and can handle growing loads without bottlenecks or resource limitations. What technological advantage does the Azul solution offer? » Network attached processing is a fundamentally better way to deploy Java-based applications as it allows these services to handle significantly larger transaction volumes, ensures consistently fast response times and dramatically lowers the deployment and administration costs. At the foundation of each appliance is the company’s innovative multicore Vega™ processor. Each chip has 24 cores and is optimized specifically for virtual machine workloads. Azul can put up to 16 Vega processors (up to 384 processor cores) and 256 GB of memory in a single 11U appliance. Azul Compute Appliances are uniquely designed with Pauseless Garbage Collection, Optimistic Thread Concurrency, fine-grained thread synchronization and other enhancements optimized for the characteristics of Java based-applications and services. Why did Azul build its own microprocessor? » None of the traditional (off-the-shelf) microprocessors on the market offered the right combination of 64-bit performance, multi-chip SMP and system RAS features that Azul needed for its Compute Appliances. In addition, Azul needed an instruction set optimized for the company’s unique approach to virtual machine-based applications. Each Azul Vega ™ processor has 24 cores and is optimized specifically for virtual machine workloads. Azul can put up to 16 Vega processors (384 processor cores) and 256 GB of memory into an 11U compute appliance. In March 2006, Azul announced the imminent arrival of its second generation platform and the introduction of the company’s Vega 2 processor – a 48-core processor based on 90 nm lithography, consisting of 812 million transistors and the ability to scale up to 768-way with 768 GBytes of memory in a single SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) Compute Appliance. Vega 2 based systems will enter into market some time in 2007. |
Want to learn more on how Azul Compute Appliances can help your organization? Contact us today or call 650.230.6650.
Add to del.icio.us »
Digg this! »
