Press Release

Network Attached Processing Requires 60% Less Energy to Deliver Nearly 15 Times More Processing Cores in the Same Real Estate

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California – August 26, 2005 –Azul Systems®, pioneer of the industry's first network attached processing solution designed to unbound compute resources for Java™- and J2EE™ platform-based applications, today announced the results of power and density analysis conducted at its Center for Unbound Compute™.  The Vega™ chip and network attached processing from Azul Systems provide data centers with more compelling economics than current commodity technologies.

The IT industry is moving aggressively toward multicore and energy-efficient system technologies and the number of CPU cores per kilowatt (kW) of electrical power has become an important metric to gain business benefit from operational savings, increased efficiency and enhanced business agility. According to IDC, the U.S. server install base will grow by nearly 50% between now and 2009 to over 14 million servers installed. At that rate, they estimate the raw electricity consumption to run those servers will be in excess of $5B per year.*

Packing 1,248 processor cores and up to 800 GB of memory in a single standard rack and drawing only 9.1 kW  (137 cores/kW) Azul compute pools address energy costs and floor space requirements while achieving higher levels of application throughput.

By comparison, the same rack packed with 2-way/1u Dell™ PowerEdge™1850 servers provides 84 cores and up to 672 GB of memory and requires 23.1 kW (3.64 cores/kW). http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx

Azul Systems offers 37.7 times better cores/kW in the same floor space than Dell.  Put another way, Azul Systems requires 60% less energy to deliver nearly 15 times more processing cores in the same real estate.

“Azul Compute Appliances are leading on density, energy, and multi-threaded performance today, lowering service level costs for web-enabled transaction processing systems,”  said Shahin Khan, chief marketing officer at Azul Systems. “Azul offers better economics than Dell which is seen in the marketplace as the pinnacle of economic efficiency.  That is a testament to the power of Network Attached Processing, and we have only just begun.  An exciting future roadmap promises further significant improvements on these metrics.”

Web-enabled applications are typically written on top of middleware software which decouples the application from the underlying CPU and operating system.  Representing a growing portion of enterprise workloads, such applications are typically highly multi-threaded where performance is strongly correlated with the number of available processor cores in a shared memory environment.

With 24 processor cores per chip (384 per flat SMP system) and support for features such as pauseless garbage collection and optimistic thread concurrency, Azul Systems Vega™ processor has established a leadership position on density, energy efficiency, and multi-threaded performance. 

Recent published surveys (see for example http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050818/185361.html?.v=1 ) confirm that cutting server costs and gaining operational efficiencies are top priorities with enterprise IT organizations. The high density and low power consumption of Azul compute pools are ideal for such data centers. 

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 and Azul are registered trademarks, and the Azul arch logo is a trademark 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. Dell and PowerEdge are trademarks or registered trademarks of Dell, Inc.  Other marks are the property of their respective owners and are used here only for identification purposes.

* Source: IDC: Server Power Consumption Reemerges As A Critical Cost Factor in Datacenters.

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