US startup's product to cut costs

Enterprise processing boxes

Azul Systems, a US-based startup, has announced the launch of a chip-based network attached processor. It is an appliance which is connected to the network and attempts to reduce the number of servers an enterprise deploys to run a variety of applications.

While the company has not yet decided on the price of the boxes, it expects clients using the devices to reap an overall 10:1 cost benefit, that is taking into account the operation and maintenance saving to be made by not having to run all those servers.

The appliances, which physically look like a couple of stacks or panels, are in the nature of super computers which have shrunk in size as a result of the strides taken by processors. But these processors are designed for running enterprise applications and do not undertake any scientific work.

It is a two-year old company which has so far received three rounds of funding and employs 150 people. No further financial information is available. At least 20 customers have shown interest and the boxes will undergo field trials at some of these Fortune 200 customers without any commitment of revenue.

Company officials claim that its high-end appliance, consisting of its proprietary 384 processor, will have the processing power of 10 Itanium-based servers. This solution does not attempt to replace a server but only does the processing without hosting the application.

The application will continue to reside on the server and when the application is called into service, it runs on this appliance leaving the server free to perform other parallel tasks. This reduces the need for large server farms in any enterprise.

This product is expected to hit the market in the first half of next year and for starters will support Java and J2EE platform-based applications. Most of the software component of this solution has been developed in its development centre in Bangalore.

Said Shyam Pillalamari, co-founder and VP- software engineering, Azul: "It is not uncommon for large data centres to have hundreds of applications running on thousands of servers. Managing and maintaining these applications becomes more challenging and costly every year as more applications are brought on-line and legacy applications are migrated to new platforms. As a result, the need for reliable, predictable, flexible and scaleable computer infrastructures to drive these new business applications has become a business imperative - and thus the demand for network attached processing."