Silicon Valley-based startup Azul Systems introduced its first
product family today designed for data centers running J2EE or .NET.
As previously reported, former Cobalt CEO and Sun Microsystems executive Stephen DeWitt is behind the company’s effort to
provide “network attached processing.” The concept is similar to
virtualization and provisioning of compute cycles commonly found in
cluster or grid environments.
While the appliances have been in field trials since last fall, Azul
also announced an alliance with IBM Global Services ,
which will provide North American service and support for Azul’s Compute
Appliances.
Instead of a rip and replace of current systems, Azul touts its
Compute Appliances as valuable additions to a network that can form
compute pools allowing the applications to share a common managed
resource.
Azul also said its appliances are set up to install with IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic platforms and JBoss and
other open source J2EE platforms without any application-level
modifications, binary compatibility requirements or operating system
dependencies.
“It’s clear that multi-core processors and network attached
processing will make IT planners rethink the value equation of today’s
infrastructure services,” Vernon Turner, an analyst and group vice
president at IT research firm IDC, said in a statement.
Compute Appliances comes in a 5u rack arrangement or an 11u rack configuration. A 96-way system with 32GB of memory starts at $89,000. There is also a 192-way system available for $199,000, as well as two configurations with 384 coherent processor cores. One high-end system comes with 128 GB memory
for $499,000. The top-end model sports 256GB memory, runs about 2.7
kilowatts — about the same as a hairdryer — and sells for $799,000.
As part of the system, Azul is also offering its policy-based Compute Pool Manager software, which allows for access from any server on the network. Shahin Khan, Azul’s chief marketing officer, said this is different from virtual machines, because you can outsource compute capacity from a server to the Azul system. You really separate
the compute from the computer, he added.
The other distinguishing factor in all of Azul’s systems is the use of
its own proprietary processor design. Instead of using an established
chip like IBM’s POWER or Sun’s SPARC, the company contracted its
blueprints to chip manufacturer TSMC to build a 64-bit symmetric
multiprocessing RISC architecture chip with 24 cores known as Vega.
The chip supports object-oriented operations, pauseless garbage collection, 96GB of heap, and optimistic thread concurrency.
“As we went through the testing of these systems we realized there
were 1,700 processor cores down this short aisle alone,” Khan said. “We were
computing not in single or dual core but in kilo-cores.”
The systems will not officially be shipping until later this quarter,
but already customers like network integrator EDS are
already helping test them.
Azul is offering a 45-day, no-cost evaluation program with a lot of
“handholding” for those customers who just want to kick the tires.