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By Tom Groenfeldt
In November, high-end department store Saks Fifth Avenue received the highest rating from Gomez, a Web performance monitoring company, for high broadband availability at 96.9 percent, narrowly beating Zappos, AmwayGlobal and Dell
The company attributes some of its 26 percent comparable store sales increase in the third quarter to the improved consistency and availability of its online store to its deployment of Azul Compute Appliances. The powerful processing system has enabled Saks.com to provide its customers with a fast, consistent and seamless user experience, allowing visitors to focus on products and style without disruption, according to a Sakes spokesperson.
"Azul's unique approach to application scalability is unmatched," said Ron Cavallo, director of infrastructure for Saks Fifth Avenue. "With the Azul Java solution we saw tremendous improvements in application performance and response time consistency in our production Web site."
The new Azul Compute Appliances are built around the Vega 3 processor, the first 54-core chip designed and optimized for Java workloads. The highly scalable Azul Virtual Machine allows individual application instances to scale to 670 GB of memory heaps and hundreds of processor cores in parallel without changing the application code. This breakthrough scalability is achieved with unique capabilities such as hardware-assisted pauseless garbage collection, which eliminates the impact of garbage collection-related application pauses, and Optimistic Thread Concurrency, which minimizes the impact of scalability bottlenecks caused by memory lock contentions.
The company set a record in 2008 on the Java server benchmark, SPECjbb2005, with 1.5 million business operations per second, which it said was 31 percent higher than the previous record while running on a system that was 80 percent lower in cost. "Customers can now scale their business critical applications while computing on very large data sets of hundreds of gigabytes of memory in a single application instance," the company concluded.
"Without changing application code or architecture, applications can deliver greater scalability and throughput, while providing consistent performance even under unpredictable load," says Azul, adding that the system "also reduces server sprawl by an order of magnitude, simplifying existing deployments and reducing datacenter costs by 30 percent or more." It started shipping the appliances in 2005 and counts BT, Wachovia, Credit Suisse, LimeWire and Sky Broadcasting as customers.
"The fundamentally new approach delivers dramatically more processing power as a shared network service while eliminating the risks associated with speculative capacity planning and over-provisioning for unpredictable application loads, allowing businesses to achieve significantly greater operational efficiencies," claims Azul.
Credit Suisse liked the concept enough to buy Azul systems for its data centers and invest in the company. "Credit Suisse recognizes the value of investing in technologies that are critical to the way we handle transaction-intensive business activities," said Alan Freudenstein, managing director at Credit Suisse. "The fact that Credit Suisse led a significant investment round in Azul Systems demonstrates our belief in, and support of, the kinds of solutions that Azul is bringing to Wall Street."
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