Java Virtualization

Today’s commercial JVMs are limited in their ability to efficiently consume more than a few gigabytes of memory without performance penalties due to garbage collection. Because Java application instances are restricted to only a few gigabytes to ensure consistent runtime behaviors, JVM instances continue to grow unabated, increasing hardware requirements and corresponding management costs (i.e. TCO). To further exacerbate these Java limitations, enterprises are embracing virtualization and cloud deployments in an effort to improve hardware utilization and application agility. But without greater Java runtime scalability and elasticity, few enterprises will be able to realize the virtues of these new deployment paradigms.

The Zing Virtual Machine (Zing VM) transports the execution of Java applications to a highly optimized and scalable platform that provides applications with 100x improvements in Java responsiveness, scalability, and throughput, liberating the Java runtime from the rigidities of the operating system. The Zing VM is completely transparent to existing applications and requires no coding changes. Available for multiple operating systems, the Zing VM can also offload Java workloads from non-x86 systems, including AIX, SPARC, Itanium and zLinux. By transparently offloading Java workloads from legacy servers, enterprises can cost-effectively migrate applications to the latest-class of x86 servers without the traditional migration risks.

Fast and easy to incorporate into existing infrastructures, transparent to existing applications on any operating system, the Zing Platform can elastically scale Java applications and economically scale up on the latest class of x86 hardware, allowing enterprises to leverage the price/performance of x86 for all their application needs.

Zing Platform

Zing is more than just another virtual machine. It’s an optimized, elastic software platform with unsurpassed scalability, manageability and visibility for all types of Java deployments. The Zing platform was designed with these key objectives:

• Deliver order of magnitude or more increases in throughput

• Scale resource allocations smoothly up and down based on demand to ensure consistent response times, even through spikes

• Simplify deployments for improved availability and reduced TCO

• Provide a true, elastic platform for enterprise clouds

• Create the best platform for the latest class of x86 server

The breakthrough technology components that make up the Zing Platform are:

Zing Virtual Machine (Zing VM) - was designed to scale applications, while efficiently leveraging the capacity of the latest class of x86 servers. The Zing VM provides 64-bit memory address space, even for applications originating from 32-bit hosts. It allows individual application instances to scale to 670 GB of memory and hundreds of processor cores, without changing the application code. This breakthrough scalability is achieved with unique capabilities such as Pauseless Garbage Collection, which eliminates the impact of garbage collection-related application pauses.

Zing Virtual Appliance (ZVA) - is a pre-built, packaged software solution that runs in an industry standard Hypervisor's such as VMWare® or RedHat® KVM. The Zing Virtual Appliance (ZVA) is highly optimized, allowing Java applications to scale far beyond normal limits dynamically and elastically. It runs an enhanced, Linux-based kernel that leverages the virtualization capabilities of the latest Intel ®and AMD™ processors, plus software that provides Java-optimized virtual memory and high fidelity thread scheduling. At runtime, application execution is seamlessly proxied via standard TCP from its current host to one or more ZVA, which can be located on the same server or on separate servers. The ZVA allows an application to run in a highly optimized environment and tap the full resources of one or more physical servers dynamically and elastically, increasing scalability and efficiency while greatly simplifying deployments.

Zing Resource Controller (ZRC) - is a fully-integrated software application that allows administrators to manage the entire Java deployment from a single, centralized console. ZRC is a flexible, policy-based management application that dynamically allocates and redistributes resources in real time to the various Java applications. It provides a consolidated view of all the resources and applications, managing them from a single console, including the ability to snapshot and track historical capacity utilization and application resource usage.

Zing Vision (ZVision) - is a true, zero-overhead diagnostic and tuning tool instrumented into the Zing VM, requiring no setup. It offers a uniquely detailed view of all performance aspects of an application, including thread, memory, and IO profiles during runtime. This visibility tool gives systems administrators ‘always on’ information to identify performance issues as they happen and take rapid corrective measures.  

Breakthrough Scalability and Performance

Zing breaks scale barriers, providing order of magnitude or more increases in throughput with consistent response times, even through usage spikes. Zing is able to achieve these results through Azul’s unique technology. It is a ‘pauseless’ platform, regardless of memory size, and can elastically scale resources and sustain those resources as required during runtime.

Actual Customer Results

Retail. This customer is a multi-billion dollar retailer. Their ecommerce application is mission-critical, providing 10s of millions in revenue per day during the holiday season. The current architecture was not able to keep up with actual growth, leading to lost revenue and a poor customer experience. With Azul, they are able to deploy a greatly simplified environment with higher availability and consistent response times that will support their revenue goal.

Zing improves scalability and response times: The original infrastructure (‘Native’) was able to support 300 users at 17 page views/sec/JVM  and a response time of 10 seconds. With Zing, infrastructure was able to support 9,000 users at 110 page views/sec/JVM and a response time of 2.5 seconds. 30x more users, 6.5x more page views, 4x faster.
 

Minimum System Specification

Azul Zing is delivered as a software platform for x86. Please note that Zing can be used in x86 deployments or to transparently offload Java execution from legacy environments (with any operating system) to x86 platforms. Minimum requirements are:

Processors

• Intel: Nehalem Xeon 5500, 5600, 6500, 7500 and above
• AMD: Opteron 6100 and above and Opteron 8300 and above

Memory and Cores

• 16 GB or greater

• 4 or more cores

Hypervisors

• KVM on RHEL 5.5

• VMware ESx 4

Zing JDK Support

• x86: Linux, Solaris
• Non-x86: Solaris