SOA Scalability Like You’ve Never Seen Before

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.

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