SOA Scalability Feature Story

Constraints of Today's Server Architecture

The last few years have witnessed an explosive growth in web services and application proliferation as businesses broaden their revenue opportunities and market share across new markets. Managing and maintaining these applications has become more challenging and costly every year as new applications are brought on-line and legacy applications evolve and are migrated to Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA).

The requirements of preserving current IT investments, coupled with the desire to create new applications that are nimble, flexible and easily adaptable to changing business conditions are often at odds. Customers are looking for the modularity and flexibility that SOAs offer, which also allows them to mix and match IT resources in a "virtual" infrastructure that is integrated while not being locked into a particular vendor's IT stack. As a popular strategy to enterprise IT implementation and application development, SOAs also reflect a dramatic shift from traditional IT practices to thinking about IT as a service.

Most customers thus far have created their application infrastructure software (application servers, integration servers, development tools and portal software) based on the familiar three-tier model to build and deploy their early SOA projects.

As SOA projects move from pilot to production, companies find that they need new infrastructure that is designed to help them to quickly compose, deliver, configure and manage these services. Customers are limited by today’s traditional server architecture as the only way to effectively scale and support large-scale enterprise application development projects, forcing customers into over-provisioning their server infrastructure and resulting in what is known as "server sprawl." They also find that they need new composition tools that work much like an "assembly line" for building cars in addition to traditional coding tools they use for "building car parts."

Introducing the Only Compute Infrastructure of Choice for
Service-Oriented Architectures

Azul Systems® Inc. the pioneer of the industry’s first network attached processing solution designed to unbound compute resources for Java™ and J2EE™ platform based applications, recently announced that BEA Systems,
a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, has agreed to provide full support for Azul Compute Appliances. The implications of this announcement
are profound since this is the first, fully supported network attached processing environment designed to simplify and accelerate the migration to an SOA environment - all while protecting existing investments.

Network attached processing allows enterprise customers to shift application costs from management and maintenance to development and innovation and offers a unique platform to build a new class of innovative applications. Service Infrastructure products from BEA help companies manage the SOA lifecycle and swiftly assemble composite applications and processes in heterogeneous environments. This unique combination of network attached processing and service infrastructure from BEA offers customers a complete compute infrastructure that is designed specifically for web service enabled workloads.

Unbelievable Side Effects

By providing a consistent develop-test-deployment infrastructure, network attached processing dramatically improves time to market for new Java-based applications and services by 40 percent or more by reducing the lengthy development stage of application tuning and optimization based on the available compute capacity. Other benefits include massive application scalability for the BEA WebLogic™ platform, predictable service levels and faster response times, eradication of server over-provisioning, pauseless garbage collection, and the reduction of capacity planning from months to days.

See for yourself...

Azul Systems and BEA have been working together for two years to provide customers with a seamless integrated infrastructure software solution that enables customers to run their businesses more efficiently. By simplifying the integration, deployment and management of composite applications and services, Azul Systems and BEA can help customers significantly shorten their development time to market and help them get from pilot stage to production with their SOA implementations.

For more information on this and how how network attached processing can help your organization, please contact sales@azulsystems.com or call 650.230.6650.