Azul Systems has introduced its Compute Appliance, an
accelerator for virtual-machine applications, such as those using
the Java platform or Microsoft’s .net development
framework.
At the heart of the Azul Compute Appliance is a 24-core, 64-bit
SMP-capable microprocessor optimised for virtual machine-based
applications. Several “network-attached processing” appliances from
Azul can form “compute pools”, allowing tens and even hundreds of
applications to share a common managed resource.
The product has been designed to eliminate capacity planning at
the application level. The company said this should lower the cost
and complexity associated with the delivery of computing resources,
reduce the number of servers required to build a datacentre and
simplify server management.
Vernon Turner, an analyst 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 of managing
their datacentres. This will fundamentally change the economics of
enterprise computing.”
According to Turner, multi-core processors and network-attached
processing will make IT planners rethink the value equation of
today's current infrastructure services.
Richard Partridge, an analyst at Ideas International, said,
“Network-attached processing enables significantly higher
utilisation, allowing IT managers to manage fewer servers, and
removes the challenge of capacity planning on a per application
basis.”
The financial services and telecoms industries are among those
targeted by the Azul appliances.
There are three configurations available, with cores containing
96, 192 or 384 processors. The price for a 96-way symmetric
multi-processing system with 32Gbytes of memory starts at $89,000
(£50,000).