Press Release

Network attached processing boosts IT productivity

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California – April 18, 2005 – Azul Systems™ Inc. today announced that customer organizations using Azul Compute Appliances are validating the capacity and performance benefits that network attached processing promises to deliver. In a separate release, Azul Systems also announced the arrival of its first generation product line, Azul Compute Appliances, which create massive pools of shared compute resources for virtual machine-based applications, and an alliance with IBM Global Services which will provide North American service and support for Azul Compute Appliances.

Without binary compatibility requirements or operating system dependencies, Azul Compute Appliances eliminate capacity planning at the application level and dramatically lower the cost and complexity associated with the traditional delivery of computing resources, providing an ideal platform to accelerate the consolidation of applications and their associated server infrastructure.

The Azul Compute Appliance uses the Azul Vega™ processor, the industry’s first 24-core 64-bit processor optimized for virtual-machine based applications.

“Our experience with the Azul appliance has been both exciting and overwhelming,” said JJ Everett, CEO of Everett Consulting, an IT management consulting firm that specializes in J2EE implementations. “Never before have we seen this level of Java processing throughput, dynamic runtime parallel compute power, and memory configurations options. Our J2EE architects have viewed a vast paradigm shift, complete with new opportunities for building applications that could not exist until now.”

“Azul's advanced technology should allow our online reservation service to scale like never before – and, most importantly, to meet the growing needs of our hospitality customers around the world,” said Robert Boles, chief operating officer at Pegasus Solutions Inc., a global provider of reservations-related technology and services to the hospitality industry.

Customers have also validated that installation and initial configuration of the appliance is quick and painless. It often takes less than thirty minutes to install and configure an appliance and make it ready to run applications. In one customer’s case, it took only eight minutes.

The benefits of network attached processing have been anticipated by the industry analyst community since the introduction of this new category by Azul Systems in September of 2004. For example, IDC, in its Predictions 2005 event, cited Azul Systems in its prediction that operating system-agnostic compute appliances will further reduce the cost and complexities associated with the general-purpose server market.

Vernon Turner, group vice president and general manager, enterprise computing at IDC said, “Azul Systems’ vision of network attached processing allows virtual machine-based applications to tap into massively scalable compute resources, offering enterprise customers a much more efficient way in managing their datacenters – this will fundamentally change the economics of enterprise computing.”

Richard Partridge, vice president and senior analyst, server research at Ideas International, said, “Azul Systems has unveiled an innovative approach that addresses a major concern confronting enterprise datacenters today – operational and availability costs. Network attached processing enables significantly higher utilization – allowing IT managers to manage fewer servers – and removes the challenge of capacity planning on a per application basis.”

“The network attached processing paradigm will quickly become a fundamental component of utility computing. Azul's solution hits on the three most important drivers we identified in a recent enterprise adoption survey: 1) improving application performance, 2) increasing computing scalability and reliability and 3) better aligning IT costs with the business”, said Scott Donahue, vice president of Tier1 Research. “Most significantly, this approach for providing processing on demand significantly makes the data center more dynamic and helps enterprises realize the benefits of the utility computing vision.”

Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director, Application Platform Strategies at The Burton Group states in an InformationWeek article, Azul Compute Appliance Debuts, April 18, 2005, “The Azul platform could provide a cheaper alternative than scaling out with traditional server systems to meet application server requirements for IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, as well as JBoss and other open-source Java 2 Enterprise Edition platforms.” Anne goes on to say “Companies faced with vertical scalability issues haven't had a lot of options other than buying extremely big machines to put in a cluster. This allows you to get more processing power to your network in the same way that network-attached storage allows you to add more storage.”

James Governor, principal analyst at Redmonk, states in a Next-Gen Data Center Forum article, Azul to Launch Virtual Java Box, April 15, 2005 , "This is a new, fairly revolutionary, approach and it will need some support. Most of the early customers will be people with large requirements like financial services and telecom firms.”

About Azul Systems
Azul Systems™ has pioneered the industry’s first network attached processing solution, designed to unbound compute resources for virtual machine based applications. Without any application level modifications, binary compatibility requirements or operating system dependencies, this fundamentally new approach eliminates the need to capacity plan at the application level and dramatically lowers the cost and complexity associated with the traditional delivery of computing resources. More information on Azul Systems can be found at www.azulsystems.com.

Legal Notices
Azul Systems, Azul, and the Azul arch logo are trademarks of Azul Systems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Java and all Java based trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. IBM and WebSphere are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States and other countries. BEA and WebLogic are registered trademarks of BEA Systems, Inc. JBoss is a registered trademark and servicemark of JBoss, Inc. Other marks are the property of their respective owners and are used here only for identification purposes.

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