Appliance boasts 48 processing cores

As Intel and Advanced Micro Devices roll out quad-core processors, newcomer Azul Systems this week plans to introduce the second generation of its Java appliances that are built on custom-designed chips containing 48 processing cores on each piece of silicon.

At the same time, Azul, which has had its initial systems in the market for about one year, is touting a growing cadre of customers, including British Telecom (BT), which is turning to the systems vendor for help in scaling transaction-heavy Web-based applications.

Azul's Compute Appliances are designed to handle the processing-intensive workloads associated with dynamic Web-based applications. The idea is to provide a shared pool of processor and memory resources for traditional application servers to tap into.

Similar to the way most servers now access buckets of external storage, application servers running the Azul proxy software can tap into the compute power and memory they need for Java or .Net processing by linking to the Azul Compute Appliance. As a result, the load on application servers is lessened and customers don't have to overprovision to ensure consistent response times for applications that spike traffic.

"We don't want to be deploying a lot of capacity that we're just not using," says Mark O'Flaherty, business-to-business delivery and operations manager for BT.

Earlier this year, BT launched a new division called Openreach that is a Web-based clearinghouse for providing services to the company's customers. Consistent, near-immediate response time is imperative for the new effort to succeed, and BT found that Azul's Compute Appliances provided the technical platform capable of achieving those goals, he says.

"This is a smarter tool that allows us to better manage [resources]," says O'Flaherty, who is based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. "It's something we've tried to do with our Unix boxes, but we just haven't had the right levers to pull. For the geeks inside of us, this is exciting; we get to think about the [technical] problem in a different way."

BT has been running Openreach on three 16-core Sun Solaris boxes but plans to offload workloads to the Azul Compute Appliances this month, eventually paring down the hardware it needs on the front end.

While BT is using first-generation Compute Appliances built on Azul's 24-core Vega processor, Azul this week is rolling out systems built on the 48-core Vega 2 processor.

"Systems in our second generation range from 96- to 768-processor [cores] in a single, coherent system," says Stephen DeWitt, president and CEO of Azul. The previous generation scaled only to 384 processing cores.

Azul's Vega 2-based 3210 and 3220 Compute Appliances, both in a 5U form factor, are priced starting at just less than $50,000 for 96 processing cores and 48GB of memory. Higher-end systems are scheduled to be available in the second half of next year, Azul says.