Shared Services =
Demand Driven Infrastructure
The Cabinet Office recently introduced a major initiative: Transformational Government –Enabled by Technology. This initiative recognises that in order for government agencies to meet the needs of its citizens, technology must be introduced that supports the delivery of shared services. The problem, however, is that government services often depend on large-scale, custom-built transactional systems that are costly to maintain and difficult to replace.
From issues of datacentre real estate and power consumption, to application capacity planning and departmental charge-backs, the move to a shared services model is fraught with many challenges using today’s traditional systems architectures. It’s worth noting that most commercial enterprise datacentres around the world are experiencing these same challenges, and it is the need to solve these problems that is driving the demand for network attached processing from Azul Systems.
» Read the full story
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Multicore Systems
Ready or Not, Here They Come
Every major chip manufacturer has delivered or announced a roadmap for multicore chips that have multiple CPUs on the same piece of silicon. Systems developers are now designing these chips into their entire product line. For Java platform developers, Symmetric Multiprocessing Systems (SMP) should be hidden well below the hardware abstraction layer, but not all applications will get equal benefits from SMP without understanding what's going on under the hood.
Java was originally designed as a language for set-top box applications and
later became a vehicle for the HotJava browser. Even though Java had first-class
support for multithreaded programming (GUI applications have long been
multithreaded), application and app server developers continued, with good
reason, to treat threads as scarce and expensive resources because the overhead
of context switches, per-thread memory, and synchronization was quite noticeable
in the sweet spot of server technology - one to four CPUs with up to eight
gigabytes of memory. Applications that could not fit into a single instance were
deployed as clusters of such instances. Even larger SMP systems, such as Sunfire
and Power series boxes, are typically divided into four CPU partitions because
of their NUMA architectures and the GC problems associated heaps greater than 4
gig. The literature on scalable Java applications is therefore filled with
design patterns and sample implementations of worker thread pools to reduce the
number of actual threads in a system, culminating in the addition of of Java5's
java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor (www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2004/09/01/nio.html http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/cpjslides/nio.pdf www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-jtp0730.html). Rather than being hidden well below the JVM abstraction layer, threads have become an integral and ongoing design point and a tuning headache for developers.
» Read the full article by Bob Pasker, Deputy CTO of Azul Systems
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Exclusive Webinar Featuring Gartner
Join Stephen DeWitt, president & CEO of Azul Systems and featured Gartner research vice president, Carl Claunch, as they present their views on some of the dramatic changes taking effect across enterprise data centers.
» View the Archived Webinar
Upcoming Events
» March 12-15, 2006
IBM PartnerWorld 2006
Las Vegas, NV
» March 21-23, 2006
Demystifying Data Centres Seminar
Holborn, London
» April 3-6, 2006
Forrester's IT Forum 2006: GigaWorld Achieving Business Flexibility Through IT Innovation
Las Vegas, NV
» May 16-19, 2006
JavaOnce Conference
San Francisc, CA
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