Heavyweight chip suppliers such as AMD, Intel,
Sun,
and IBM
are touting multi-core systems and that’s just fine with upstart company Azul Systems.
The Silicon Valley systems maker, which is touting its network attached processing systems, has found the multi-core
religion with its unique “compute appliance” that packs 24 “brains” or cores
on the company’s Vega processor.
One advantage of dual and multi-core systems is that, working together, the
cores can greatly speed processing if software is written or adapted to take
advantage of the extra horsepower.
“The problem for data centers has been the total cost of ownership
increases as companies want to run more applications,” said Scott Sellers,
co-founder and chief technical officer at Azul. Sellers spoke at the Fall
Processor Forum conference in San Jose, CA this week.
He said companies are buying more servers to handle multiple application
requests at peak demand times. But most of the time servers are likely to be
operating at a fraction of their capacity.
Mountain View, CA-based Azul shipped its
first “Compute Appliances” earlier this year. Azul said its primary customers are data centers at Fortune 1000 companies. Its compute appliances are designed for the latest generation of Web-based Java software such as J2EE
“Gartner [the IT research and consulting firm] reckons that about half of
enterprise applications today are written in virtual machine languages such as Java, and .Net,” said Sellers. “And by 2008 that number will be up to 80
percent.”
At the conference, Sellers said his company is also working on support of
Microsoft’s .Net
Another advantage of multi-core systems is lower power consumption. Having multiple cores on the same chip generates significantly less power than multiple individual processors would. Sellers
said some data centers essentially overpaid for rack servers they can’t
fully populate because of the power and heat generated by many of today’s
high-end processors.
“Traditional air cooling technologies are not sufficient,” said Sellers.
Last week, Azul announced several new
capabilities for utility computing and data center environments. The
new capabilities, such as utility charge back and transactional quality of
service, are designed to help corporations process transactions over
the Internet.
Azul also updated security by allowing its software to
integrate with customers’ authentication and authorization directories
through RADIUS, an open source project focused on network authentication
services.
The theme of the Fall Processor Forum conference, which ends Wednesday,
is “The Road To Multicore.” Pegasus Solutions has
already followed that road as an early buyer of Azul systems for its back-end
processing. The company provides services to the majority of the world’s
travel agencies and more than 60,000 hotel properties worldwide.
“They slashed their costs by a factor of twelve” by switching to Azul,
claimed Sellers.
