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| January 2005 | |
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In This Issue: |
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| • | President's Message - Stephen DeWitt, President & CEO | |
| • | Technology from 'Out of the Blue' - Shahin Khan, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer | |
| • | Upcoming Events - Unbound Compute Webinar! | |
President's
Message |
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New Year, New Era of Compute Last year was a pivotal year for utility computing. Around the world, companies began to understand how a variable-cost, resource-driven computing model will reduce costs by conserving IT resources and simplify planning, purchasing and maintenance. We also saw steady maturation of enabling technologies, including virtualization, grid and blade servers. In addition, Intel, AMD, Sun and IBM all announced multi-core chip initiatives, another critical enabling technology. This is a clear acknowledgement of the changing nature of today’s virtualized business applications, and a powerful indicator that we have reached a critical inflection point in the evolution of compute resources needed for utility computing. Many of these multi-core chip initiatives will take time to mature and large hardware vendors may take years to deliver utility computing solutions. Fortunately, Azul saw these trends years ago and pioneered a system architecture ideally suited for today’s application workloads. We are poised to unleash a major technological breakthrough in 2005, the industry's first general purpose, multi-core chip – designed specifically for virtual machine execution – with 24 coherent CPUs. Our chip technology, is just the beginning. We have married this architecture with network attached processing, a sophisticated new approach to delivering compute resources that eliminates existing problems with scaling virtual machine based applications. Our first appliance, which includes up to 384 coherent processor cores and 256GB of fully symmetric memory, is being tested by some of the most demanding customers around the world in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo and London. The buzz is loud and clear: network attached processing will deliver significant elements of the utility computing vision in 2005. While large hardware vendors are still in development, Azul will shatter the economics of delivering compute resources. Consider this: today, the only way to purchase compute resources is in multiples of very small denominations – 2-way, 4-way, 32-way, 64-way, and so on. Companies cluster these small partitions of compute resources, and use virtualization technology to make the partitions even smaller – that is, they make it possible to run a greater number of small applications on these partitions. The problem with this is that it imposes an arbitrary constraint on the creativity of application developers who are limited to figuring out just how powerful of an application they can create under the confines of a 4-way server, considered the “sweet spot” of our industry. To eliminate this constraint, Azul is pioneering the era of unbound compute. Enterprise applications will be able to tap into endless pools of perfect processing power, freeing application developers to create the best possible applications for the job at hand – not the best possible application that can run on constrained, limited resources. We believe this will usher in the next major wave of innovation in our industry, and it is one of the most important innovations to come to the world of computer systems in decades. The coming year promises to be an exciting one in technology, and I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on trends, products, evolutions, revolutions, and possibilities. Here’s to 2005!
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| Technology from 'Out of the Blue' By Shahin Khan, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer |
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Anyone for 1.2 kilo CPUs? The new age of “Unbound Compute” for business applications Remember when PCs had a grand sum of 64 kilo bytes of memory? Today, we count memory in small laptops in hundreds of mega bytes and the memory in big servers in fractions of tera bytes. The same thing happened to disk space: mega bytes to peta bytes. What’s next? exa, zeta, and yotta. More about that later – probably in my upcoming blog. But when it comes to CPUs, we still measure in single digits. An 8-way seems like a pretty large system. The 32-way, 64-way, and 200-way systems seems huge. Even when we scale out, anything beyond a couple of hundred CPUs begins to challenge our ability to manage and operate the complex. It’s no accident that they call these systems a “complex.” A major shift is coming. Over the next few years, your ordinary applications will be able to tap into systems with, say, 7,000 CPUs, 50 tera bytes of memory, and 20 peta bytes of storage. In 2005, Azul Systems will ship compute pools with as many as 1,200 CPUs per a single standard rack (1.2 kilo cores! I like the sound of that!) What would change about application design if you could do this? Well, think back to what applications were like when you had just 128K of memory in your PC and a 512KB hard drive. The difference between the capabilities and flexibility of applications then and now is the level of improvement that we are talking about. If you could count CPUs the same way you count memory, some problems would simply become uninteresting and others would transform in a qualitative way. And completely new possibilities would emerge. Deployment and administration of applications would also dramatically change. Do you ever worry about how much storage an individual user might need? Probably not. You just install a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device with a tera byte of storage and let everyone share it. This approach works because no single user is likely to fill it up quickly and you can plan storage capacity across all your users rather than each individual one. Do you ever worry about the utilization level of an individual byte of memory? I hope not. You have so many bytes that you measure utilization at the aggregate level. If you had hundreds of CPUs in a miniaturized “big-iron” system that were available to your applications, you could adopt the same strategy for applications. No need to plan capacity for each individual application! Let all of your users share a huge compute pool and plan capacity across many applications, similar to network attached storage. In the process, you also fundamentally change the economics of computing. That’s exactly what Azul Systems is pioneering - network attached processing. This is a whole new way of looking at the CPU, and therefore, the function of “compute.” This approach is gaining mainstream acceptance. The industry has reached 2 or 4 CPUs on a chip for large symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems; and for systems limited to one chip, tens of functional units in one CPU. Some companies have announced future chips with as many as 8 CPUs on a single chip. With 24 CPUs on a chip that can be used in an SMP system, Azul has already set the bar much higher. And that’s just the beginning! Get ready for an era when you can order CPUs by the thousands. And get ready for the new language of that era: Do we say: 2.5 kilo CPUs? Do we call this kilo core, or mega core processing? And since it goes way past current multi-core technology, do we call it poly-core technology? Here is a possible headline in 2005: Poly-core Technology to Enable Kilo Core Processing. Happy 2005!
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| Upcoming Events | ||
Upcoming Webinar! A new era of compute is upon us! Industry experts, including IDC, have predicted that network attached processing will be a key theme driving enterprise IT strategy in the coming months. On January 27th, Shahin Khan and Gil Tene, two of the industry's leading authorities on enterprise computing will host an hour long webinar discussion around network attached processing - the groundbreaking technology that eliminates much of the cost and complexity associated with scaling Java™ platform-based applications, finally bringing the benefits of utility computing within reach. When: January 27, 2005 Why Attend? Network attached processing enables customers to:
Register today and find out how you can begin evaluating network attached processing at no cost. For more information on this event or to find out more about unbound compute, please contact Elizabeth Lochner at 650.230.6539 or elochner@azulsystems.com.
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