Certified Partners

On Tuesday, August 9, 2005, Azul announced that a formal agreement has been put in place defining a joint support, licensing, and certification agreement designed to enable optimized deployment, service and support for BEA WebLogic™ Platform Customers using Azul compute pools. Listed below is a brief summary of the details as well as an FAQ.

This agreement allows Azul and BEA to join forces in order to offer dramatic improvements in utilization. Customers have overwhelmingly identified utilization as a critical item. In a recent survey of 450 customers conducted by Azul, the highest utilization reported was only 18%. By deploying Azul compute pools, customers are realizing upwards of 50-60% utilization – a dramatic benefit that will allow customers to more freely pursue application development innovations using SOA initiatives and other business priorities to help make them more competitive.

Components of the agreement

• Support: Joint support is currently available for BEA WebLogic platform running on Linux/x86 or SPARC/Solaris servers that tap into the power of Azul compute pools.
• Licensing: The companies have defined a software licensing model for BEA applications on Azul.
• Certification: A certification process has been defined for future offerings. Certification of WebLogic Platform 8.1 on Azul appliances for servers running AIX, HP-UX or Windows will be available from BEA within 90 days of the general availability of respective Azul proxy software.

Certification of Azul technology as an optimized compute infrastructure across entire WebLogic Platform 8.1 Suite will be completed by January 2006.

Joint Licensing Details
The licensing structure is centered on delivering the most customer value, without adding unnecessary cost structure.

Azul compute appliances are analogous to “power stations” that are tapped by traditional servers. In a traditional utility model, there is no utility metering at the power station level; the metering is done where the decision to use the power is made, at a house for example! Similarly, the licensing structure here is defined at the level of servers that tap into the Azul compute pool, not the compute pool itself. At a high level, there is no licensing on the Azul Compute Appliance.

Early typical Azul customer environments include running multiple applications using different software products (potentially from different vendors) on the same compute pool. We have found that host server capacity is the simplest and most cost efficient metric for measuring the potential throughput of any individual application . Because a single server is unlikely to tap the power of an entire compute pool, measuring host server capacity is much more cost efficient than periodically measuring actual throughput on the compute pool. Customers only have to purchase licenses for applications that are indeed benefiting from the capacity of the compute pool. In other words, when customers are only slowly transferring applications to the compute pool and it is only partially utilized, they do not have to purchase licenses for idle compute pool capacity .

This licensing model also means that if you have many servers, only the ones that actually use the Azul compute pool are charged, improving utilization, protecting the customer from unnecessary charges, and allowing customers to more freely pursue application development innovations using SOA initiatives and other business priorities to help make them more competitive.

Customers interested in more detailed licensing information please contact Azul Sales sales@azulsystems.com.