The start-up is emerging from the shadows with an interesting
proposition — what it calls network attached processing. The idea, surprisingly enough, is similar to network attached storage, but is designed to offload the grunt work of running virtual machines — Java, .Net or any other kind — to a scalable computing fabric based on hardware specialised for the task.Azul is still at the stage of informing the public of its existence. The company was formed in 2002, with Cobalt founder Stephen DeWitt recruited as chief executive, but was only publicly unveiled in September 2004. Its first products were announced at the end of April 2005 and became generally available at the end of June. Azul opened a full-scale UK operation — based in Slough — in October.
"We have a healthy double-digit number of engagements with household-name customers," says Shahin Khan, Azul vice-president and chief marketing officer. These include telcos, e-commerce companies, manufacturing and financial services, he says. Among the customers they've gone public with so far are data centre management company EDS and Pegasus Solutions, which handles bookings for about 60,000 hotels, cruise liners and other travel reservations.
Products in the company's Compute Appliance line, launched in April, sell for up to $800,000 (£467,000), but Azul is also taking aim at the mainstream. In early November the company launched a 100-core platform called CentiCore, priced at $60,000.
How it works
So what does Azul actually do? The company's big idea is that the
rapidly growing virtual machine workload in the enterprise — caused by
a boom in J2EE-based applications — calls for a new way of handling
processing. General-purpose servers aren't especially well designed for
running virtual machines, whether Java, .Net or any other type, and
adding more VM processing capacity in a conventional server arrangement
is expensive.
Enter Azul, which leaves a company's existing infrastructure in place, but runs the VM itself in a separate pool of specialised hardware. "When your application invokes Java, it invokes our VM rather than the one it would usually invoke," says Khan. "Our JVM keeps the OS-dependent activity on the existing server, but moves the entire Java VM — class libraries, methods, bytecodes, bit compilers, all of that — over to the Azul appliance."
This requires a configuration change on the existing application server. So far Azul has achieved certification with BEA and JBoss application servers, and is working on others. Azul is also working on .Net certification, which it hopes to deliver in 2006.
The appliance itself is based on a general-purpose 64-bit RISC chip called Vega, which has a few tweaks designed for VM workloads. First of all, the chip has 24 cores, important for Java applications, which tend to be highly multithreaded. "Compare that to the recent...
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