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Whitepapers
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Available for Immediate Download |
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| Delivering a Breakthrough Java™ Computing Experience
Java is well established as the dominant programming model for the Enterprise, and has a significant footprint in over 90% of large companies. As it continues to mature, Java™ is increasingly used to support very large business critical applications, sometimes referred to as Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) applications. This paper discusses how Azul Compute Appliances complement existing infrastructure with highly scalable compute and memory resources for Java-based applications and meet the demands of XTP applications, by delivering extreme throughput and scalability with consistent performance, without changing the application code or architecture. |
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| Architecting High Performance eCommerce Platforms
This paper outlines the primary steps to building successful eCommerce architectures which include (1) understanding the business drivers and IT challenges, (2) creating a demand model, and (3) translating and incorporating both into the eCommerce architecture. The first two sections will cover the business drivers and how these translate into IT challenges. We then outline a model for business demand. The remainder of the paper focuses on designing and creating the eCommerce architecture. |
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| Driving Efficiency by Designing, Building and Operating Datacenters with Green in Mind™
As a member of the Green Grid—a consortium of information technology companies and professionals seeking to lower the overall consumption of power in data centers—Azul Systems is committed to actively adopting environmentally responsible practices in product development, operations and the supply chain. Azul offers organizations the best path to meet increased computing demands while improving power and cooling infrastructure efficiency that lowers the total cost of ownership. With Azul, companies can reduce infrastructure, power, and cooling costs by more than 50 percent even as throughput is increased and service levels are maintained. |
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| Azul Compute Appliances: Ultra-high Capacity Building Blocks for Scalable Compute Pools
Deployed in compute pools, Azul Compute Appliances can host hundreds of applications simultaneously, providing dynamic access to a shared set of compute resources to meet peak application workloads while eliminating capacity planning at individual application level. This paper discusses how Azul uses the power of application virtual machines and multicore chip technologies to deliver massive amounts of operating system agnostic compute resources to Java™ and J2EE™ virtual machine-based applications. |
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| Pauseless Garbage Collection: Improving Application Scalability and Predictability
"Garbage collection," a time consuming task that is required in virtual machine based applications, has been the subject of innovative optimization strategies in recent years. This paper describes the Azul garbage collection algorithm and its benefits as compared to traditional garbage collection approaches. |
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| Optimistic Thread Concurrency: Breaking the Scale Barrier
As processor counts increase, standard approaches to concurrency control – mutual exclusion locks – can create scalability bottlenecks that lead to underutilized CPUs. To address the scalability problems of standard approaches to locking, Azul Systems® implements a new locking approach called “optimistic thread concurrency.” Based on proven techniques used in database systems to improve throughput in transactional systems, optimistic concurrency improves throughput by allowing code that would otherwise be serialized to be safely executed concurrently. |
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| High Performance, Cost Effective Solutions for eCommerce
Deployed in the world’s largest eCommerce companies and in some of the most demanding production environments—ranging from B2B gateways to travel reservation systems to online portals—Azul Compute Appliances are high capacity network-attached systems that deliver highly scalable compute and memory resources as a shared network service for Java-based applications. |
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| Breakthrough Solutions for the Capital Markets Industry
The Azul platform was designed specifically to help firms effectively manage the major trends affecting today’s rapidly changing capital markets, i.e., massive increases in trading volumes due to the transition from pit-based trading to automation, regulatory compliance pressures, and increased risk management through derivatives. To address the key technology challenges facing the industry, Azul enables financial services firms to achieve optimal transaction processing application performance, scalability and service levels on the Java platform. |
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| Virtualization for Large Transaction, Transaction-Intensive Enterprises
Java is Azul Compute Appliances bring all the benefits of virtualization to large business-critical Java applications. The Azul solution complements traditional virtualization solutions with a large pool of shared compute and memory resources. Applications are consolidated on virtualized servers, while dynamically and transparently accessing highly scalable CPU and memory resources of the Azul Compute Appliances over the network – enabling a 10X reduction in number of servers and ensuring consistent application Quality of Service (QoS) even under unpredictable loads. With the mainframe-like management capabilities of Azul Compute Appliances, each application is guaranteed to receive the exact amount of resources it needs, the moment it needs it, without manual intervention. |
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| Network Attached Processing: Scaling Enterprise Application Deployments
Network attached processing is the industry’s first solution specifically targeting virtual machine based applications and the transaction processing needs of the modern application tier. Network attached processing provides massive amounts of compute power as a shared network service, similar to the manner in which network attached storage provides shared storage capacity to the data center. In this whitepaper, you'll learn how network attached processing presents IT organizations with a superior strategy for overcoming the challenges of existing approaches to scaling virtual machine applications. |
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| The Azul Virtual Machine: Realizing the Elegance of Java Technology
Intended for engineers and system managers who are responsible for application architecture, development, and deployment, this paper describes the innovations in the Azul Compute Appliance with a focus on the Azul Virtual Machine, the relationship between the Azul VM proxy and the Azul VM engine executing on the compute appliance, the synergies between the Azul hardware and the VM, and powerful new optimizations enabled by the unique features of the Vega processor. |
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| Reliability, Availability, and Servicability (RAS): Characteristics of the Azul Compute Appliance
The Azul Compute Appliance is designed with enterprise class reliability, availability, and serviceability features. This paper examines the hardware and software methods employed by the Azul Systems architecture to attain the high level of RAS within the Azul Compute Appliance. |
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| Java Application Environment Security with Azul Compute Appliances
Designed as a hardened appliance with an embedded operating system, Azul Systems® Compute Appliances can be confidently and easily deployed within the data center and be shared by hosts from security-isolated subnets as a common computing resource. This paper discusses the Azul compute appliance features that ensure data and system security in a network attached processing environment. |
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| Reducing the Cost of Application-tier Deployments with Network Attached Processing
Network attached processing presents IT organizations with a superior strategy for overcoming the challenges of existing approaches to scaling virtual machine applications. This white paper analyzes one example of a deployment for a customer in the financial services industry. This paper is intended for IT, finance, and other professionals who are responsible for IT budgeting and application deployment planning. |
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Case Studies
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Groupe Mutuel Turns to Azul Systems for Proven Customer Portal Scalability |
Given the dynamic and competitive health insurance environment in Switzerland, Groupe Mutuel recognized the need to provide a wider variety of choices to its health insurance carriers, including different levels of benefits, deductibles and premiums, as well as the latest information on pharmaceutical treatments. By leveraging the power of its customer portal in its call center operations, Groupe Mutuel was able to streamline internal processes, while providing higher customer service levels and improved operational efficiencies. |
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Azul Helps Canadian Bank Realizes 500% IT Performance Improvement |
| One of Canada's leading providers of advisory and capital market services to corporations, governments and institutions runs a wide range of business-critical Java™ applications, including those to support its algorithmic trading operations, credit and risk analysis, as well as various types of ad-hoc queries and data mining operations. Faced with increasing transaction volumes, more stringent reporting and analysis requirements, and strained IT resources, this Canadian bank needed a scalable trading and risk analysis platform to consistently meet SLA s goals and control datacenter costs. | |
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CreditEx Eliminates Garbage Collection Pauses |
Creditex Group Inc. (Creditex) operates a hybrid model of voice and electronic execution, and was the first to successfully launch electronic trading for Credit Default Swaps (CDS) in 2004. Creditex has maintained its leadership position in electronic trading and successfully launched several anonymous electronic execution products, such as VolumeClearing™, in North America, Europe and Asia. In addition to its core execution business, Creditex has two operating subsidiaries, TZero and Q-WIXX, which provide additional electronic processing and execution services in the CDS space. |
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BSkyB Boosts Online Presence |
| British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) is the UK's largest digital pay television platform operator and a leading broadcaster of sports, movies, entertainment and news. Today, more than 8.8 million customers - equivalent to almost one in three households in the UK and Ireland - subscribe to BSkyB's direct-to-home service. In addition, there are over 1.2 million broadband subscribers and 915,000 residential telephony customers. | |
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Lime Wire Deploys Media Store Resulting in Time-to-Market Advantages |
| Lime Ware needed to deliver an exceptional experience to millions of registered users, support billions of queries per month through scalability and fast response time at a lower operational cost, all while guaranteeing a consistent positive consumer. Azul Compute Appliances enabled Lime Wire to gain required scalability to meet their throughput challenges and provides the incremental headroom to grow as needed. Lime Wire can now scale multi-threaded applications from 4 threads to 100's of threads and has the ability to achieve real-time performance monitoring and profiling. | |
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CitiStreet Achieves Extraordinary Scalability and Consistent Response Time on Benefits Web Portal |
| A few years ago, CitiStreet standardized on a scale-out architecture based x86 Linux systems and JBoss application servers for deploying their web applications. In order to meet increasing throughput demands, the architecture eventually grew to 48 dualcore, dual-CPU servers. Consequently, this was beginning to substantially increase data center costs and complexity. In addition, heap sizes started to increase, creating unpredictable garbage collection pauses that caused inconsistent application response times, especially during those peak open enrollment periods. After learning of its proven successes in helping enterprises scale Java application deployments while reducing data center complexity, CitiStreet turned to Azul Systems and eventually made the decision to standardize on the Azul platform to build out their core benefit administration architecture. | |
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Openreach Thinks Outside the Box: A Case Study Based on Axway Synchrony Gateway Solution |
| BT is a leading communications solutions and services provider operating in 170 countries. In the UK alone, BT serves more than 20 million business and residential customers with more than 30 million exchange lines. In response to January 2006 government deregulation mandates, BT announced the creation of the Openreach and Wholesale B2B Gateways, and implemented Azul Compute Appliances in order to sucessfuly provide guaranteed service levels for response times and transaction volumes to all its customers. | |
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Baseline July 2007 Issue: Serving the Java Crowd |
| TransUnion Interactive, the direct-to-consumer business of Chicago-based TransUnion Corp., the big credit reporting agency, was facing processing load challenges and spikes in demand that required additional computing power. Organizations would typically add additional servers to manage large processing loads, however, TransUnion decided to deploy it's Web-based application on Azul Compute Appliances, reducing the number of general purpose application servers by a factor of 6 while improving throughput for each application workload. | |
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TrueCredit Where Credit is Due |
| TrueCredit relies on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) of many composite applications built on the Java™ platform. As workloads increased, these applications began to experience out of memory errors, application pauses due to garbage collection and other capacity issues. TrueCredit turned to Azul Systems in their search for a solution to better align the needs of their business and be able to respond more easily to the company’s changing business priorities. | |
Analyst Reports
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July 2008 - The 451 Group Impact Report |
Azul launched Vega 3 in May; it's the third generation of its Java offload appliances that offer a pool of processor and memory resources for multiple applications from Solaris, Linux, HP-UX or IBM AIX operating systems. The original Vega 1, launched back in 2005, scaled up to 284 cores with 200GB of memory. Vega 3 now takes that up to 864 cores and 768GB.
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July 2008 - The 451 Group Impact Report |
The 451 Group's IT evolution model shows how grid computing has been useful for improving performance and resource sharing, virtualization for efficiency, utility for billing and recharge discipline, and service-oriented architecture for reusability and business process alignment.
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September 2007 - The 451 Group Impact Report |
The 451 Group provides an assessment on Azul Systems in light of its recent funding and the introduction of two new Vega 2 Compute Appliances, the 7240 and 7280 models.
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June 2007 - Illuminata Research Note |
Recently Illuminata, a well known research analyst firm that provides research-based insight and advisory services for enterprise decision makers, provided an independent in-depth analysis on Azul Systems and the progress we have been making. Since the introduction of second generation Vega 2 appliances, we have delivered solutions to the world’s leading investment banks, Telecom companies, Retail companies, etc.
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May 2007 - IDC Vendor Profile |
This IDC Vendor Profile examines Azul Systems and its focus and success on delivering immediate business value by transparently improving the performance of Java-enabled workloads. The company, now four years old, is working on delivering greater quality of service (QoS) for large, business-critical, Java-based applications that are running across a multitier enterprise computing environment.
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February 2007 - Gartner Research Note |
Extreme transaction processing (XTP) is an emerging application style aimed at enabling the implementation of large-scale, business-critical, transactional applications on the basis of distributed architectures implemented by leveraging commodity hardware and standards-based software. This research discusses a set of emerging XTP-enabling technologies, including Azul Compute Appliances.
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February 2007 - IDC Insight |
This IDC Insight examines Azul Systems, a Silicon Valley firm that is focused on optimizing the performance of Java-enabled workloads. The company, now four years old, is working to improve business results from Java-based applications that are running across a multitier enterprise computing environment.
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August 2006 - Robert Frances Group: Custom Research Note |
Robert Frances Group believes that several evolutionary technology trends are converging to offer significant promise to IT executives pursuing effective data center transformation. Specifically, purpose-built IT appliances and engines, until recently focused primarily upon enhancing networking and storage, are now addressing applications and services. IT executives should closely examine these emerging, innovative solutions for addressing their changing business needs, and for consolidating and enhancing data centers and servers in ways that can improve both security and performance.
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April 2006 -
Butler Group: Technology Audit Azul Systems Network Attached Processing and Azul Compute Appliance |
Butler Group believes that Azul Systems offers an innovative solution for data centers that deliver substantial benefits. The paper explains how the Azul Compute Appliance, which can be pooled to provide virtually unlimited processing capacity, can deliver significant performance improvements over conventional JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) while reducing the size and complexity of enterprise server farms.
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March 2006 - Robert Frances Group: Custom Research Note Data Center Transformation: Observations and Recommendations |
Robert Frances Group believes the enterprise data center is undergoing significant and sustained transformation, as enterprises seek to build and operate more business-centric, elastic, and services-based IT infrastructures, and as underlying technologies undergoes experience a massive architectural shift.
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July 2005 - International Data Corporation (IDC)
Multicore Processing Scenarios, 2005-2009: Disrupting the IT Market in Three Generations? |
Multicore processing, and the technology enhancements that multicore processing enables across the IT industry, could be one of the most significant developments in the past 40 years. Consequently, IDC believes...
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December 2004 - The 451 Group
2005 Preview: Network Attached Processing – Appliances Revisited |
Application-specific systems are starting to emerge, partly as a result of new virtualization technologies that hide differences in hardware from the software stack. How far are things likely to go?
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December 2004 - International Data Corporation (IDC)
Multicore Processing: Disruption or Distraction for the IT infrastructure? |
Multicore processing (or the ability to place many general-purpose or specialized
processors on a single socket) may be one of most important developments to impact the IT infrastructure since the birth of Ethernet.
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October 2004 - ideas international Technology Trends
Azul Network Attached Processing for Java and J2EE Applications |
Azul Systems has revealed its strategy for network attached processing – a new approach to delivering Application Tier computing for Java™ and J2EE™-based applications....We believe the company is offering an innovative approach to network attached processing for large Java and J2EE deployments.
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Datasheets
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SAS® Financial Management 4.4 and Azul Systems® Compute Appliance |
The combination of Azul Compute Appliances and SAS Financial Management enables users of SAS FM to increase the number of concurrent users and improve the performance of reporting processes, such as consolidation, budgeting and planning and compliance. The joint solution has demonstrated tangible positive results in real-world environments. |
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REALTime Performance Monitor (RTPM): Unleash the Performance of Your Business Critical Java Applications |
Azul REALTime Performance Monitor (RTPM) is a new breed of diagnostics and tuning tool instrumented into the Azul Virtual Machine. RTPM constantly monitors the entire application, the VM and its underlying layers such as I/O sockets and file caches, and complements traditional Java performance tools with rich, always-on, real-time visibility into the performance of both the application and the Java Virtual Machine. |
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Azul Compute Appliances |
Azul Compute Appliances are high capacity network systems used to improve the performance, scalability and TCO of enterprise Java deployments. Applications are offloaded transparently from traditional servers to the appliances where they gain access to nearly unlimited CPU and memory resources that deliver sustained high throughput, and consistently low response times. |
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Hardware and Software Interoperability |
| Azul Compute Appliances deliver performance and scalability benefits to heterogeneous data center environments. Support and compatibility are provided with the leading server platforms, software standards, and development and performance monitoring tools. This wide scale compatibility ensures that the value of your Azul Compute Appliance purchase can be extended across your enterprise needs. | |
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Want to learn more on how Azul Compute Appliances can help your organization? Contact us today or call 650.230.6650.
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Azul partners with the most innovative and accomplished ISVs in the world. Together we are delivering enterprise class solutions for key business applications, including:
- Trade settlement
- Foreign Exchange
- Regulatory and Risk Management
- Reservations Systems
- Business Process Management
- Customer and Employee Portals
- Call Center Applications
- Web Services and SOA deployments
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Azul demonstrates unique server leadership for Enterprise Java applications, and its capabilities should be reviewed closely. The company is taking a fresh approach to overcome the most challenging issues of the business applications.
- Cal Braunstein
Chairman & CEO
Robert Frances Group
