Azul Systems has announced the availability of two new Vega 2 Compute Appliances. The 7240 and 7280 models are the most powerful SMP systems in a compact form factor, the company says, offering up to an unprecedented 768 processing cores on 16 processor chips with 768 GB of memory.

Click here to view Azul's Shyam Pillalamarri on SYS-CON.TV

Click here to view Azul's Gil Tene on SYS-CON.TV

The new Compute Appliances provide the fastest path to maximizing the ROI of business-critical Java applications, by allowing applications to transparently achieve 5X to 50X greater scalability and throughput while delivering consistent performance even under unpredictable load. The new systems further enhance Azul's product line by offering high-end single-box solutions for challenging business applications in capital markets, telecom B2B and B2C enterprises.

"The 7240 and 7280 pack enough punch to provide breakthrough scalability and performance to handle the demands of the largest business-critical applications," said Scott Sellers, chief operation officer and co-founder of Azul Systems. "The Vega 2 processor is the only solution with a Java-optimized instruction set, hardware-assisted garbage collection, and support for optimistic thread concurrency -- making the Vega Compute Appliances the industry's first and only platform to deliver the speed and consistency IT departments need to use Java for business-critical and demanding applications."

"SAP had a need to deliver computational scalability and performance for the analytics application that deals with memory heaps of hundreds of gigabytes," said Igor Tsyganskiy, head of the Advanced Technology Group at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. "The Azul Systems Vega 2 7200 system delivered the required throughput and response time due to its scalable memory architecture and advanced garbage collection technology; this type of capability could not be achieved with traditional server technologies."

SYS-CON.TV recently conducted in-depth interviews with Azul CTO Gil Tene and VP/Software Engineering Shyam Pillalamarri, during which they discussed the company's original vision and where it is going today.

According to IDC, sales of enterprise servers to run Java-based workloads exceeded $11.2 billion in 2005 and are expected to continue to grow rapidly, fueled by the explosive growth in Java programmers and the use of Java in enterprise applications. However, business-critical, transaction-intensive applications such as those found at financial institutions, telecommunications organizations, and e-commerce sites require highly scalable compute resources and management capabilities, which alternative server platforms cannot efficiently address. Azul will continue to provide the processing and memory resources required to enable the continuing evolution of large enterprise applications.