Azul Systems Sets Compute Standard for Service-Oriented Architectures

Azul Systems, Inc., the pioneer of the industry's first
network attached processing solution designed to unbound compute resources for
service-oriented applications such as those based on the J2EE(TM) or Java(TM)
platform, today announced several capabilities for utility computing and data
center environments. The new capabilities, such as utility chargeback and
transactional quality of service, will help customers compete successfully in
today's service-oriented world. With this release, Azul Systems solidifies its
position as the compute platform of choice for Service-Oriented Architectures
(SOA).
This transparently-deployed compute platform from Azul helps web-enabled
transaction processing environments in the financial services,
telecommunications, e-commerce and healthcare industries guarantee quality of
service in a shared environment. It reduces complexity, space requirements
and power consumption and, by eliminating server over-provisioning, increases
application throughput and delivers cost-effective scalability.
"Service-Oriented Architectures promise to be crucial enablers in
delivering dynamic IT and high-value business computing platforms, but for
widespread adoption to occur, new catalyst technologies must help enterprises
move from SOA pilot projects to implementing and rolling out company-wide
solutions," said Vernon Turner, group vice president and general manager,
Enterprise Computing, IDC. "Azul Systems' easy-to-implement technology that
helps ensure higher service levels is one of those catalysts helping to make
SOA implementations attainable."

Enhanced features of Azul Compute Appliances include:

Application Detail Records -- Similar to the "call detail records" in
telecommunications, Azul solution software provides detail data
collection of resource usage across a compute pool for each application,
enabling billing and chargeback at the application or department level.
A simplified billing process is a critical step on the path toward making
utility computing a viable model for an enterprise IT infrastructure.

Transactional Quality of Service -- Azul compute pools can react to
variations in transaction load by redirecting resources among
applications in less than ten milliseconds. This is significantly less
than the typical two-second response time for transactions. This near
real-time capability enables customers to offer guaranteed quality of
service based on each individual transaction. It can also allow multiple
high-priority applications to share the compute pool resources without
fear of resource conflicts that can cause application delays and poor
response times.

Broad OS Support -- Azul compute pools, designed to be platform agnostic,
can be tapped from any system running any OS and any application virtual
machine. Support for HP-UX and AIX operating environments are now
available, complementing existing platform support for Red Hat, SUSE and
Solaris environments.

Java SE 5.0 Platform Support -- Azul also now supports applications based
on the Java SE 5.0 platform, the latest version, allowing developers to
take advantage of the new features without worrying about heap size,
application pauses due to garbage collection, or fine grain thread
locking among many application threads.

Role-Based Security -- Compliance with security policies is critical in
data centers, especially in multi-tenant environments. Azul software
provides the ability to integrate into customers' existing authentication
and authorization directories through RADIUS, an open source project
focused on network-wide centralized authentication and accounting
services. This capability makes it possible to define access control and
permissions on a fine-grained basis to meet the different needs of
system, security, and application administrators.

Verified Vulnerability Scan -- Azul Compute Appliances have now been
verified to be safe for deployment in enterprise data centers. A
complete port scan of the Azul Compute Appliance has been conducted to
verify the absence of any port or socket vulnerabilities. This was done
using NESSUS, a widely used open source project focused on vulnerability
scans to audit business-critical enterprise devices and applications.

Real Time Resilience -- Azul appliances are now able to provide dynamic
non-disruptive de-configuration of memory modules which experience
uncorrectable or intermittent failures, and to place a deferred service
request by notifying IT operations. This capability can be extended in
the future to include non-disruptive de-configuration of any individual
CPU core. This complements the existing set of reliability,
availability, and serviceability (RAS) technologies such as redundant
fail-over network connectivity, error checking and correction (ECC) on
all on-chip caches and system memory, N+1 power supplies and cooling,
boot-time de-allocation of a CPU core based on run-time data and power-on
self test, low component count, etc.

Enhanced Manageability -- SNMP monitoring capabilities have been extended
with the addition of alerts that can be used to track RAS and application
events originating from the Azul compute pool, offering improved
integration with existing network management products such as IBM Tivoli
or HP OpenView.

"With new capabilities, broader platform support and enhanced security and
reliability, the Azul Compute Appliance is simply unbeatable as a rock-solid
cornerstone of today's large-scale enterprise data centers and service
provider infrastructures," said Shyam Pillalamarri, vice president of software
engineering and co-founder, Azul Systems.
The updated Azul compute solution will be available this quarter. For more
information, please contact Azul Systems at sales@azulsystems.com.

About Azul Systems
Azul Systems, Inc. has pioneered the industry's first network attached
processing solution, designed to unbound compute resources for virtual machine
based applications. Without any application level modifications, binary
compatibility requirements or operating system dependencies, this
fundamentally new approach eliminates the need to capacity plan at the
application level and dramatically lowers the cost and complexity associated
with the traditional delivery of computing resources. More information on Azul
Systems can be found at http://www.azulsystems.com.

Legal Notices
Azul Systems and Azul are registered trademarks, and the Azul arch logo is
a trademark of Azul Systems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
Java and all Java based trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
Other marks are the property of their respective owners and are used here only
for identification purposes.

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