Our Industry is Clearly at an Inflection Point
The majority of new applications being authored inside of large enterprise customers or in the development labs of the leading ISVs around the globe are built around application virtual machines such as Java™/J2EE™ or .NET™. These object-oriented, multi-threaded development platforms allow businesses of all types to leverage a new wave of applications that open new markets, reduce costs, and, in general, make customers more competitive in the markets they serve. Throughout the past decade, however, we all have watched first hand the challenges associated with scaling these applications and delivering predicable application performance under varied conditions.
For years, data center managers have either scaled applications horizontally by clustering small servers and leveraging load balancing techniques to spread out workloads across machines. Alternatively, customers where consolidation was a major driver have scaled applications vertically leveraging larger SMP-class server infrastructure to get the job done. The inefficiencies associated with both of these computing models are well understood and have resulted in much of the hype and hope around the promise of utility computing.
Enter Azul. Network attached processing is a revolution in compute infrastructure for virtual machine based application environments. In network attached processing, Azul Compute Appliances create a massive compute pool – a shared network resource accessible from any operating system or application server middleware. The compute pool provides unlimited compute resources without application-level modifications or binary-compatibility requirements, so it can be transparently deployed into an existing infrastructure to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity associated with the traditional delivery of computing resources.
For large-scale transaction-based applications, Azul offers two key technology advances that solve the scalability problem of poor response time. First, the Azul Compute Appliance includes hardware-assisted “garbage collection.” Garbage collection is necessary to consolidate memory that becomes fragmented over time, causing application pauses that create unacceptable delays in large applications. Azul has eliminated these pauses. Second, Azul has created hardware-based “optimistic thread concurrency” to reduce “synchronization lock contention.” The problem here is that although applications may be multi-threaded, allowing multiple events to occur simultaneously, as application processing load increases, some actions must occur before others in order for the result to be accurate. Ensuring this order is called “synchronization lock,” and it creates unacceptable delays in large applications. Azul has eliminated the problem through hardware that dynamically detects which locks can be speculatively bypassed – which turns out to be most locks.
The result of these innovations is that network attached processing delivers predictable response times under the unpredictable loads of even the most data-intensive environments. Network attached processing also eliminates the need to capacity plan at the individual application level, improving hardware utilization and scalability. The technology can cut system and facility management costs in half even as it opens the door to a new class of innovative applications librated from traditional CPU constraints.
Ultimately, the benefit of network attached processing to application developers in transaction-intensive industries is they can leverage the “write once, run anywhere” benefits of Java to quickly deploy innovative applications and create a level of competitive advantage that hasn’t been seen in these industries for years.
At Azul, our focus has always been to create technology that directly and immediately translates into solutions to critical business challenges. I’d love to hear from you about the business challenges you face in your business and discuss how our technology may hold the key to solving those challenges. Please email me at stephen@azulsystems.com.
Stephen DeWitt
President and CEO
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