Azul Systems

Virtualization specialist Azul Systems has overhauled its product line, unveiling a set of hardware it claims can significantly reduce the processing strain on data center servers. (See Azul Launches Vega 2 Devices.)

At an analyst event in New York last night, the startup took the wraps off the latest additions to its line of Vega compute appliances, which it claims can increase the amount of data cached within a grid architecture by a factor of 50.

Azul's strategy is focused on freeing applications from their individual servers and sharing them across the entire data center infrastructure, powered by the compute appliances. Supporting Java and J2EE-based applications, the devices use a virtual machine proxy technology and its own set of silicon to redirect workloads across the available pool of compute resources.

The idea here is that by offloading Java workloads to processors in its devices, Azul frees up data center servers to work on other things and also removes the need for users to keep servers in reserve to cope with processing peaks and troughs. (See Azul to Launch Virtual Java Box and Building Virtual Empires.)

The two appliances launched last night, the 7240 and 7280, are both 14U-high. The 7240, which is only half-populated with silicon, contains 384 processor cores and 384 Gbytes of memory. The fully packed 7280 consists of 768 processor cores and 768 Gbytes.