"Everything in the data center stays exactly the same," Shyam Pillalamarri, co-founder and vice president of software engineering, said. "The only thing that changes is the application sees an immense amount of computing power and memory capacity."
The system only supports the Java 2 enterprise platform, which is the core of application infrastructure software sold by IBM, BEA Systems and Sun. There are also open-source versions like Apache Tomcat.
Pillalamarri, former vice president of software engineering for the Internet protocol services business unit at Nortel Networks, said the sales pitch for Azul's technology is its ability to slowly reduce the number of computer servers used by an organization. Rather than buying new servers or upgrading old ones to increase capacity, companies can buy an Azul appliance and get continued use out of their existing infrastructure.
"The old servers will be perfectly capable of running existing applications, and yet have a tremendous capacity boost," Pillalamarri said. "It's not a rip-and-replace (sales) strategy. It targets incremental growth."
Azul plans to eventually support Microsoft Corp.'s .Net Framework, which competes with the Java 2 Enterprise Edition in application development and as a runtime environment. That support, however, probably won't be available until 2006, Pillalamarri said. Azul chose to support the Java platform first, because it has a larger installed base than the newer .Net.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
