Credit Suisse backs utility computing

Credit Suisse is buying into Azul Systems' idea of creating pools of computing resources to support processing-intensive Java applications, and plans to install the start-up's multi-core systems to allocate resources on demand across its data centers worldwide.

The financial services company in Zurich, Switzerland, also announced earlier this month that it was investing in Azul. The financing, the amount of which was not disclosed, is part of a second round of funding for Azul, which closed its Series A round last April. Existing investors, which include Accel Partners, Austin Ventures, ComVentures, RedPoint Ventures and Worldview Technology Partners, also participated in the round.

"The real message here is the validation of a top bank," says Scott Sellers, an Azul co-founder who is the company's CTO and vice president of hardware engineering. "It's all about bringing network-attached processing to Wall Street."

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Credit Suisse is buying into Azul Systems' idea of creating pools of computing resources to support processing-intensive Java applications, and plans to install the start-up's multi-core systems to allocate resources on demand across its data centers worldwide.

The financial services company in Zurich, Switzerland, also announced earlier this month that it was investing in Azul. The financing, the amount of which was not disclosed, is part of a second round of funding for Azul, which closed its Series A round last April. Existing investors, which include Accel Partners, Austin Ventures, ComVentures, RedPoint Ventures and Worldview Technology Partners, also participated in the round.

"The real message here is the validation of a top bank," says Scott Sellers, an Azul co-founder who is the company's CTO and vice president of hardware engineering. "It's all about bringing network-attached processing to Wall Street."

Credit Suisse is Azul's second announced customer. The first was Pegasus Solutions, which provides technology and services to hotels and travel distributors.

Credit Suisse says Azul will help it move to a utility data-center model that can be accessed by a variety of different applications. With the Azul Compute Appliance, CPU and memory resources will be allocated to applications according to demand, enabling Credit Suisse to charge internal users based on use and QoS, executives say.

"Instead of something that is purely based on physical assets such as the purchase of a server, we move to virtualizing the physical resources and then charge back based on the amount of [resources] used," says an IT technology strategist at Credit Suisse in New York who asked not to be named, in accordance with company policy. "So if they use more or less compute power or memory, we can charge based on that and also based on [QoS]. It allows us to make sure that applications [consumers] are paying appropriately for their use of IT resources."

Azul's 11U Compute Appliance, which began shipping last June, is built on a custom-designed processor with 24 processing cores. The system comes with between four and 16 processors, meaning customers can get as many as 384 cores and as much as 256GB of memory in a box. That pool of processors and memory can be allocated on demand to handle Java workloads that are offloaded from existing application servers.

The Compute Appliance becomes an extension to existing environments; no modification is needed to applications or hardware architecture, the IT technology strategist says. The only change is that proxy software is installed on application servers directing them to send Java processing to the Azul appliance. A management tool lets users set business rules and priorities to control how much processing power is assigned to each application.

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