Credit Suisse buys, invests in Azul's network-attached system

Computerworld - Azul Systems Inc., a hardware start-up that sells network-attached processing, said yesterday that Credit Suisse Group has become a user of its systems as well as an investor in the company.
Details of the investment weren't disclosed, but Credit Suisse agreed to talk about the use of Azul's system provided that the IT official who answered questions wasn't identified by name. A company spokesman said it was corporate policy.
The Zurich-based financial services company said Azul's system will help it move to a utility computing-based model as well simplify its IT environment.
Credit Suisse said the network-attached processing system will allow it to share a physical service across a number of applications. Azul's attached processing systems are optimized for Java and J2EE-based applications. Mountain View, Calif.-based Azul has developed processors with 24 cores per chip and can support up to 16 processors in its symmetrical multiprocessing system. The company began shipping its systems last summer.

Network-attached processing doesn't replace the application server, which could be an x86 server running Linux, but the Java workload is offloaded to the Azul machine. This reduces the workload on the application server.
Credit Suisse uses Azul's system to virtualize compute resources and allocate memory and processor power to its Java-based applications as needed. Because the system can also use large amounts of memory, that has improved performance for its applications that need a lot of memory, the IT official said.
As a shared physical resource, the financial services firm plans to use this capability to create managed services for internal users based on service levels and quality of service instead of the cost of a physical server or processor. The work remains in its early stages, and "it remains to be seen what's going to work. But our goal is to do that kind of chargeback," the IT official said.

This is the second customer Azul has announced, although the firm says it has other customers that it can't disclose. For a company introducing a new technology, having customers "who are willing to talk about the benefits of the technology will be critical to build up any market momentum," said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Research in Hayward, Calif.

Users tend to enjoy the "comfort of the crowds" when picking technology, and new systems require a lot of time spent on education, he said.