The argument goes that such a system can deliver far more processing power for VM workloads, while taking up far less space and power — though of course it only makes sense for companies that have significant VM workloads to churn through.
Azul's appliances can currently put 16 chips into a single chassis, meaning 384 processor cores in about 11U of rack space, consuming 2.7kW of power, the company says. Three systems in a standard rack would add up to 1,250 cores, with 800GB of memory, consuming about 9kW.
"That is astoundingly low," says Khan. "Generally you'd get 40 or 80 CPU cores in one rack, and the best [power consumption] you could get today for that would be about 22kW to 25kW. With 1,250 cores, the CPU core-per-watt metric is about 37 times better than a typical Dell system."
Better utilisation
Besides taking up less space in the data centre, the network attached
processing model has other benefits, such as better utilisation and
simplified capacity planning. "It's like NAS — the benefits of it are
so well understood now — people know if you are going to get
storage for more than one or two people, you will really benefit from
having shared storage," says Khan.
One of the assumptions Azul is making is that enterprises have such a massive VM workload that they're ready to invest in new ways of handling it. On paper, at least, this looks like a solid proposition. Service-oriented architectures are on the rise and are bringing with them a surge in VM applications — Gartner says that by 2008 more than 80 percent of new e-business applications will be based on VMs. The figure is already at 50 percent today, says Khan. Industry analysts such as RedMonk, however, say that only big companies will be likely to significantly benefit from Azul-style systems for now.
That hasn't stopped Azul from targeting the mid-range with its CentiCore platform. Announced in early November, CentiCore includes the 960 Compute Appliance with 96 processor cores, two Penguin Computing dual-core Linux servers, a Gigabit Ethernet switch and JBoss application server software.
Azul isn't alone in targeting ways to improve Java processing, which would seem to indicate a certain level of demand. BEA, for instance, in September introduced WebLogic Real Time Edition, which also takes aim at the problem of servers timing out to perform garbage collection. Real Time Edition reduces these pauses to a few milliseconds. A number of...
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