Azul Systems

Infobox company
company_name = Azul Systems
company_type = Private
company_
company_slogan = Capacity. Plugged In.
foundation = 2002
location_city = Mountain View, California
location_country = United States
key_people =
Scott Sellers CEO, President, and Co-Founder
Shyam Pillalamarri, Vice President of Software Engineering, Co-Founder
Gil Tene, Vice President of Technology and CTO, Co-Founder
industry = Diversified computer systems
products = Computer servers
homepage = http://www.azulsystems.com/

Azul Systems, Inc., a privately held company, manufactures computer appliances for executing Java-based applications. Founded in March 2002, Azul Systems is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices in Slough, United Kingdom; Tokyo, Japan and Bangalore, India. [cite web | url=http://www.azulsystems.com/company/location.htm | title=Company Locations | publisher=Azul Systems ]

Products

Azul produces a Java Compute Appliance (JCA) which is designed to massively scale up the usable compute resources available to Java applications. A proxy Java Virtual Machine (JVM) installed on an existing system will transparently redeploy Java applications to the Azul appliance, the latest version of which, the Vega 3, can contain up to 864 processor cores and 768 GB of memory. [" [http://www.azulsystems.com/products/compute_appliance.htm Azul Compute Appliance] " - Azul Product Page] Re-hosting a resource-limited Java application on a JCA can be done without changing the existing application and provides an alternative to traditional scalability architectures which deploy multiple application instances on many smaller commodity systems to offload the computational responsibilities of the original server. [" [http://techiteasy.org/2007/11/09/high-availability-architectures-44-technology-trends/ High Availability Architectures: Technology Trends] " - TechITEasy, November 9, 2007]

By integrating the hardware, kernel and JVM components within this appliance, Azul is targeting two major limitations on Java application scalability. It addresses the first, large grained locking, with a technology called Optimistic Thread Concurrency (OTC) [" [http://www.azulsystems.com/products/whitepaper/wp_otc.pdf Optimistic Thread Concurrency - Breaking the Scale Barrier] " - OTC Whitepaper] , that attempts to substantially increase the parallelism of multi-threaded Java applications, which as Amdahl's_law predicts, is particularly important for Azul's Vega systems, which generally contain hundreds of available CPUs.

The second is Pauseless Garbage Collection (Pauseless-GC), which exploits hardware extensions to allow a Java application executing on a Vega system to directly utilize 100 to 200 GB of memory without suffering significant pausing, an increase of two orders of magnitude over competing platforms. [" [http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2008/pdf/TS-6500.pdf Performance Considerations in Concurrent Garbage-Collected Systems] "- 2008 JavaOne Presentation] [" [http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=26347 2GB Java Memory Limits] "- ServerSide Discussions] [" [http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/gc1.4.2/ GC Tuning] "- Sun JVM Tuning Guide] Access to this level of available memory would reduce the need for administrators to schedule controlled application re-starts to prevent garbage collection pauses from manifesting themselves, and Azul offers a published guarantee that a multi-threaded Java application will improve its performance and response times significantly when transparently rehosted on its appliance. [" [http://www.azulsystems.com/content/programs/550_guarantee/guarantee_definitions.htm Azul 5-50 Performance Guarantee] "- Azul 5-50 Guarantee Definitions]

At the time of this writing (October 2008) an Azul Java Computing Appliance holds the world record for the most Business Operations per Second (BOPS) on the Standard_Performance_Evaluation_Corporation's JBB2005 industry-standard benchmark "designed to measure the server-side performance of Java run time environments". [" [http://www.spec.org/jbb2005/results/jbb2005.html SPEC JBB2005 Results] "- Official SpecJBB2005 Benchmark Results]

Company History

Azul Systems was founded by Scott Sellers (now President & CEO), Shyam Pillalamarri (VP Software), and Gil Tene (CTO). The first compute appliances, offered in April 2005, were the 960, 1920 and 3840, consisting of 96, 192 and 384 processor cores, respectively. [" [http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/0418azul.html Azul takes wraps off Java compute appliance] " - NetworkWorld.com, 04/18/05]

Stephen DeWitt previously held the position of CEO. [Citation
last = DeWitt
first = Stephen
title = Commission of Corporations, State of California, Notice of Transaction Pursuant to Corporations Code 25102(f)
place = San Francisco
publisher = California Department of Corporations
year = 2003
url = http://134.186.208.228/caleasi/PDFDocs/003709994.PDF ]

Legal Issues - Settled

Azul Systems was approached in 2005 by Sun Microsystems, who offered a licensing deal for patents it claimed Azul had violated. [" [http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=3D1FB268-09FC-4D70-BA00-FF31494FD469 Azul CEO accuses Sun of "exorbitant" licensing demands] " – CBR, 16th March 2006] In March, 2006, Azul Systems sued Sun Microsystems, asking a U.S. District Court in northern California to rule on the issue of patent infringement. In May 2006, Sun Microsystems sued Azul Systems in federal court in San Jose, CA, claiming patent infringement and violation of a non-competitive agreement with former Azul CEO, Stephen DeWitt, also a former Sun employee. Both parties agreed to the terms of an undisclosed settlement in June 2007 prior to either suit going to trial. [" [http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199905532 Sun Microsystems Settle Patent Disputes With Azul] " - InformationWeek, June 20, 2007]

Finances

Based on public filings [http://www.corp.ca.gov/CalEASI/caleasi.asp Cal-EASI Database] ] , Azul has raised more than $178M in financing to date.

Major investors include Accel Partners, Austin Ventures, Credit Suisse, Meritech Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Velocity Interactive Group, and Worldview Technology Partners. [cite web | url=http://www.azulsystems.com/company/investors.htm | title=Azul Systems Investors | publisher=Azul Systems ] ComVentures and JVax Investment Group have also invested in Azul. [cite web | url=http://www.azulsystems.com/press/091307_40m_financing.htm | title=Azul Financing Press Release | publisher=Azul Systems ]

Current Production

Azul Systems released the Vega 3 7300 Series in May 2008. The 7300 series contains up to 864 processing cores with 768 GB of memory and two 10 gigabit network adapters. [cite web |url=http://www.azulsystems.com/products/compute_appliance.htm|title=Azul Compute Appliances|accessdate=2008-05-23 |publisher=Azul Systems|date= ]

Azul Systems released the Vega 2 7200 Series, in June 2007. The 7200 series contains up to 768 processing cores on 16 processor chips with 768 GB of memory. Azul designed the 48 core Vega 2 processor chip. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) fabricated the Vega 2 processor. [" [http://www.chiplist.com/Java_Crunching_Monsters/tree3f-article--25-/ Java-Crunching Monsters] " – The Chiplist, June 14, 2007] Notable companies utilizing the 7200 series include Credit Suisse, Wachovia, British Telecom, and TransUnion.

References

External links

* [http://www.azulsystems.com/ Azul Systems] - Official site.
*" [http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=126573 Azul Launches Vega 2 Devices] " – Byte and Switch, June 14, 2007
* [http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=178530 Butler Review of Azul's Compute Appliance] - Technology Audit