Vega 3 Series Compute Appliances
Record-Breaking Performance

The Azul Vega™ 3 7300 and 3300 Series compute appliances offer an unprecedented amount of highly scalable compute capacity for Java-based applications, with up to 864 processor cores and 768 GB of memory in a flat SMP configuration. The unique software and hardware-assisted features of the Azul solution enable applications to transparently tap into this capacity over the network and reach unprecedented levels of scalability, throughput, and performance consistency. With this production-proven architecture the Azul Vega 3 Series has set the performance record on industry standard SPECjbb2005 and XMLMark tests.

The Vega 3 Series appliances advance the unique business benefits delivered by the Azul solution, and are the fastest path to maximizing the ROI of business-critical applications. Without changing application code or architecture, applications can deliver 5X to 50X greater scalability and throughput, while providing consistent performance even under unpredictable load. The Azul solution also reduces server sprawl by an order of magnitude, simplifying existing deployments and reducing datacenter costs by 30% or more.

The new Azul Compute Appliances are built around the Vega 3 processor, the first 54-core chip designed and optimized for Java workloads. The highly scalable Azul Virtual Machine allows individual application instances to scale to 670 GB of memory heaps and hundreds of processor cores in parallel without changing the application code. This breakthrough scalability is achieved with unique capabilities such as hardware-assisted Pauseless Garbage Collection, which eliminates the impact of garbage collection-related application pauses, and Optimistic Thread Concurrency, which minimizes the impact of scalability bottlenecks caused by memory lock contentions.

Vega 3 Solution Benefits

The Vega 3 7300 Series is uniquely positioned to address many of the highest priority requirements for Java-based applications:

• Breakthrough Scalability for Extreme Transaction Processing
  - Offers the fastest path to delivering Extreme Transaction Processing performance, without changing the application's code or architecture
  - Meets the unique scalability, reliability and memory needs of Java applications

• Engine for Service Oriented Architectures
  - Provides industry leading Enterprise Service Bus scalability
  - Serves as a consolidation platform for multiple SOA services, providing dynamic resource allocation between services to support highly unpredictable workloads, and eliminating IO bottlenecks between services

• Power Stations for Data Grids
  - Increases the maximum amount of data cached on the grid by 50X
  - Increases data throughput by 20X
  - Allows applications to co-reside with the cached data on a single system, increasing application performance with faster data access

• Platform for Shared Services
  - Constitutes an ideal platform for shared services, providing shared compute capacity to multiple applications over the network
  - Preserves OS, resource and security isolation between applications
  - Reduces number of conventional servers by 10X or more
  - Reduces TCO by 50%

• Industry's Most Efficient Delivery of Compute Capacity
  - Reduces server sprawl with up to 33x more throughput than conventional x86
  - Reduces power, cooling and space requirements by 50% - 95%

What's Included in Vega 3

Hardware Capabilities

The Azul Compute Appliance is available in two hardware configurations, depending on the number of processors and memory required.

• 3300 Series is provided in a standard 5U chassis allowing between 108 and 216 Vega processor cores, and between 48 and 192 GB of memory
• 7300 Series is provided in a standard 14U chassis allowing between 432 and 864 Vega processor cores, and between 192 and 768 GB of memory

Management Tools

The core software management capabilities of the Azul Compute Appliance provide essential configuration and monitoring of appliance and application resource use and health, with standard integration into common network management systems.

• Compute Pool Manager (CPM) provides a complete array of capabilities to configure, manage and monitor status for all hardware elements of the compute pool. CPM lets users snapshot and track appliance capacity utilization and application resource usage.
• REALTime Performance Monitor (RTPM) is a diagnostics and tuning tool instrumented into AVM. RTPM offers a uniquely detailed view of the real-time activity of both the application and the underlying VM. RTPM is the perfect tool for rapidly diagnosing scalability, response time and throughput problems in record time.
• Status and Alert Interfaces. CPM supports SNMP monitoring and alerts through standard NMS platforms. Generated CPM events can be directed to syslog output, and forwarded via SMTP to a user-defined email alias, enabling administrative personnel to easily stay abreast of compute appliance status.
• In-Band and Out-of-Band. Management features are accessible either as part of the data network or through a separate management network interface.

Core Capabilities

The core feature set of the Azul Compute Appliance provides Java applications with unique virtualization, scalability, operating cost and availability advantages, as well as first-class security, management, interoperability and investment protection.
More »

Application Performance and Scaling

Azul Systems unique application performance and scaling capabilities enable Java applications to achieve record-level workload throughput while delivering consistent response times. Existing applications typically perform well beyond their current limitations to open up new software possibilities. More »

Highly Available Resource Pooling

Compute Pool Manager allows multiple compute appliances to be combined to form large capacity, highly available resource pools. Policy-based admission and resource controls simplifies application governance and routine adjustments. More »

Workload Management

The workload management capabilities elevate the control over the entire pool of compute appliances and its resources to mainframe-like levels, while keeping the same simple usage principles. Strict control and monitoring of resource allocation and use allow delivery of compute as a utility. More »

The Vega 3 Series of Compute Appliances offers industry-leading performance for the most demanding, business critical Java™ applications. Based on the third generation Vega processor from Azul, these appliances have been designed from the ground up for the ultimate in Java application performance, response time, and stability. This is complemented by unique, hardware-assisted performance features that allow enterprise Java applications to transparently deliver unparalleled scalability, throughput, and consistent response times without changes to existing application code.

Breakthrough Scalability

Enterprises rely on applications to generate revenue and drive customer satisfaction. Business success requires highly scalable architectures that support unpredictable, dynamic workloads. Applications that cannot scale to meet immediate demand can delay or fail to complete customer interactions, resulting in lost sales and loyalty.

Azul Vega 3 Series appliances deliver breakthrough scalability as demonstrated on SPECjbb2005, Enterprise Service Bus, and XMLMark performance benchmarks. On these industry-standard benchmarks which are representative of typical Java workloads, the Azul model 7380 has achieved record-setting performance numbers. More »

Consistent, Fast Response Times

When critical business applications pause, companies lose money. When it comes to fulfilling on-line purchases, executing stock trades at the real time price, acting on price fluctuations or approving loan applications, completing only 85 percent of the requests in time is a failure. When an application doesn't respond in a timely manner, the customer goes elsewhere and may not come back. Revenue is being lost. Yet many businesses today are living with 15 percent or worse incompletion rates due to application pauses caused by scalability or memory limitations. It's time to stop leaving money on the table.

For a wide range of business critical enterprise Java applications, Azul Compute Appliances has dramatically reduced the worst-case response times as compared to traditional servers, all while enabling applications to scale to significantly higher levels of throughput. With Azul Compute Appliances, worst-case response times are typically reduced by a factor of 3x to 10x as compared to UNIX and x86 servers, enabling applications to deliver much more consistent performance even for highly unpredictable and spiky workloads. More »

The Industry's Most Efficient Delivery of Compute Capacity

Server sprawl puts tremendous pressure on enterprise datacenters. The huge growth of computing requirements over the past decade has led enterprises to increase their installed server base dramatically, creating a complex infrastructure that is costly to manage and is consuming ever more power, cooling, and datacenter space. This problem is growing exponentially over time, and leading CIOs have made it one of their top priorities to consolidate servers and contain the growth in datacenter power and cooling requirements.

Azul Compute Appliances are the industry's most efficient way to deliver compute capacity. Azul Compute Appliances reduce the pressure on enterprise datacenters by reducing server sprawl by an order of magnitude and providing industry-leading power and space efficiency. More »