Press Release

Delivers Breakthrough Technology for Java Performance, Accelerates Data Center Consolidation and Virtualization Initiatives

Mountain View, Calif. – May 20, 2008 – Azul Systems, a leading provider of enterprise-class application performance and IT solutions for Java applications, today announced the availability of the Vega™ 3 Series appliances, which provide breakthrough performance and a cost effective way for companies to run, process, and manage Java applications for their business critical needs. Compared to the company’s pioneering first generation Network Attached Processing product,, the Vega 3 products represent a fivefold improvement in performance demonstrating Azul’s commitment and execution on an aggressive product roadmap. This new innovative solution, packaged in compact 5U or 14U appliance form factors, makes it easier for Enterprises in the E-Commerce, Financial Services, Web Hosting, and Telecommunications markets to maximize transactional volumes and minimize downtime, while significantly decreasing overall response time. The Vega 3 Series provides companies with opportunities to run their businesses in environmentally-friendly ways by aiding datacenter virtualization initiatives and reducing power consumption costs yet still consistently improving the performance of applications.

The new Vega 3 appliances are unique and purpose-built for business critical Java applications, and are based on the industry’s most advanced microprocessor, a 54-core processor designed to support the needs of scalable multi-threaded applications built on application Virtual Machine platforms such as Java. The new Vega 3 appliances extend Azul’s innovative paulseless garbage collection capability to 670 GBytes in a single Java Heap, over 200X greater than traditional alternatives. The new DirectPath™ feature of the Vega 3 appliance enable customers to improve the performance of their service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments by 100X or more over traditional servers by dramatically improving inter-VM communication, while also reducing latency by orders of magnitude. These new capabilities allow customers to realize the architectural advantages of SOA deployments without the associated performance and latency penalties.

"Several trends, including SOA-based integration, customer expectations about application performance, and ongoing transaction volume growth, are causing performance problems for application servers that cannot be solved simply by adding more servers to a cluster. Enterprises are looking at new ways to scale out their applications to solve these problems," stated Maureen Fleming, program director, IDC Business Process, Integration & Deployment Software.  “Technologies that offer predictability, while removing memory limitations and data bottlenecks are becoming foundational to application infrastructure."

Azul has a proven track record in delivering over 10X higher throughput and faster response times to its list of top enterprise customers world wide in Capital markets, E-commerce and Telecommunications markets. The Vega 3 extends the Azul 5-50 guarantee (Azul’s promise that customers’ applications throughput and response time will improve by 5 times while their data caching capacity increases by 50 times), ensuring success in high throughput and ultra fast response time and consistency for Java applications.

”Building on excellence and innovation, the Vega 3 is yet another stepping stone to make life easier for both Java architects and IT managers,” said Ram Appalaraju, Vice President of Technology and Product Marketing for Azul Systems. “More and more businesses are using Java applications for mission critical functions and demanding higher performance from these applications, but at the same time they are looking to simplify, consolidate, and virtualize their data center operations. The Azul Vega 3 is a solution that meets this next generation need of IT organizations.”

Vega 3 Supporting Partner Quotes
“With the increased deployment of SOA applications, there is an unpredictable and enormous increase in data traffic that is overwhelming traditional database management systems,” said Juan Menendez, senior vice president at GemStone Systems. “By bringing together award-winning GemFire software with Azul’s new Vega 3 appliance, SOA applications can now overcome data bottlenecks by scaling beyond 300 GB of resident memory and achieving data throughput of over 40,000 writes per second.“

“As the leading web experience management company we are constantly looking for ways to boost throughput and accelerate performance for our customers’ web properties. Azul’s Vega 3 system offers compelling capabilities on this front,” said Somesh Singh, Senior Vice President of research and development and technical operations at Vignette. “By using Vignette’s High Performance Delivery and Azul’s Java Compute Appliance, organizations can deliver super fast, high throughput web applications, enabling them to offer a web experience that is unmatched in the industry.”    

About Vega 3
The Azul Vega 3 Series consists of high capacity appliances used to improve the performance, scalability and TCO of enterprise Java deployments. The series is based on a state-of-the-art 54-core process and systems that scale from 108 to 864 cores and up to 768 GB of fully symmetric memory in a compact appliance package. With the Vega 3, Java applications can now scale to memory heap sizes up to a record 670GB without garbage collection pauses. The Vega 3 is a shared network resource that provides a pool of processors and memory for multiple applications to simultaneously tap into from Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, Windows or AIX operating systems using any Java or Java-compatible application server. The shared resources supplied by the Vega 3 Series also allow data center administrators to reduce the number of physical or virtual servers they deploy, reducing the footprint and power and cooling costs. Azul offsets all carbon emissions credited to each of its products sold under support for the life of each product’s deployment.

About Azul Systems
Azul Systems (www.azulsystems.com) is a global provider of enterprise server appliances that deliver virtualized compute and memory resources as a shared network service for transaction-intensive and QoS-sensitive applications built on the Java™ platform. Azul Compute Appliances enable Java-based applications to transparently achieve 5X to 50X improved performance by scaling and simplifying application integration. Our green friendly compute infrastructure supports the business priorities of today’s most demanding enterprise environments and delivers increased capabilities, capacity, and utilization at a fraction of the operating cost of traditional computing models.

Legal Notices
Azul Systems and Azul are registered trademarks, and the Azul arch logo is a trademark of Azul Systems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All Java-based trademarks and their logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other marks are the property of their respective owners and are used here only for identification purposes.

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