INDUSTRY

Azul Systems, the pioneer of the industry's first network attached processing solution designed to unbound compute resources for virtual machine based applications, such as those based on the Java platform, announced today that together with Tangosol, a leading provider of solutions that help organizations achieve high availability and extreme scalable performance for large-scale enterprise applications, has completed benchmark tests that demonstrate a significant throughput increase with dramatic infrastructure reduction, validating the claimed benefits of Azul Compute Appliances for large-scale deployments in financial services. Tests conducted at the Azul Center for Unbound Compute showed that a typical deployment of Tangosol Coherence, on a 1-way Xeon-based Linux server would be able to handle six instances of the application and more than seven times more load by tapping into 10% of a 384-way Azul 3840 Compute Appliance. In this test a 1-way Xeon (2.66GHz) server was loaded with a single instance of Coherence handling simulated load until its CPU became fully saturated (23,000 transactions per second). The Xeon server was then attached to the Azul compute pool and loaded up with six instances of the application. All Java processing was performed on the Azul compute pool leaving just I/O and any native OS calls on the Xeon server. After increasing load the Xeon server again reached full saturation, but this time it was handling more than seven times as much throughput as had been the case without the Azul appliance (170,000 transactions per second). The host server was successfully able to consolidate 6 applications with the Azul compute pool still largely untapped and available for use by other enterprise Java applications. This indicates a significant opportunity for application consolidation without compromising performance, high-availability, or application isolation. "As our work with Tangosol demonstrates, Azul offers a unique and powerful solution to our partners that can dramatically improve the joint value proposition we offer customers," said Stephen DeWitt, president and chief executive officer of Azul Systems. "The combined solution of Tangosol and Azul will enable customers to completely change their data center expansion strategy, significantly lower their TCO and increase ROI on their service provisioning plans." Tangosol's in-memory data management, caching and grid computing solution provides continuous availability, unlimited scalability, and extreme performance to mission critical Java applications for many of the world's largest organizations, such as financial, insurance, telecommunications, retail, travel, government, logistics, and other institutions. Unlike typical software, Tangosol achieves near linear scalability simply by adding cluster nodes instead of database capacity. With the Azul network attached processing solution, however, instead of adding a series of physical 1-way nodes, very large virtual nodes can be provided on the Azul Compute Appliance, fronted by small proxy partitions on the traditional application server host hardware. "Our goal has been to achieve unprecedented levels of availability and scalability while significantly lowering total cost of ownership for our customers, and Azul has enabled us to take another major step forward," said Cameron Purdy, president of Tangosol. "With the combined solution, companies can significantly reduce the hardware required for scaling their deployments, while improving throughput, availability, and resilience -- all critical requirements of our financial services and other customers." The dramatic increase in throughput shown in this test is the result of the value Azul offers as a network-based shared resource with hundreds of processor cores available for thread execution and memory heaps as large as 96GB per application instance. This test also demonstrates that even though application execution is being stretched over a Gigabit Ethernet link, aggregate throughput is greatly increased. On August 2nd of this year, Azul and Tangosol announced an alliance to create a more cost-effective platform with the high performance, data coherency, massive compute resource scalability, and guaranteed data protection required in financial services and other industries.