Startup Azul Systems on Monday will launch a new breed of virtualization device targeted at data centers: specialized appliances that offload Java-based application workloads from servers.

Precise product specifications on the devices, which are called Compute Appliances, are yet to be revealed, although Azul has confirmed some details to NDCF. It will be a powerful box: At the high end, the family will include an 11-rack-unit-high appliance, with 384 processor cores and 256 gigabytes of memory. An Azul spokeswoman says that a 96-processor box will sit at the low end, although she would not confirm the device’s memory capacity. At the moment, users have to keep additional processing capacity within their servers to cope with peaks and troughs when dealing with Java-based applications. Azul hopes to remove this need by using virtualization technology to redirect these workloads to the new appliances (see Azul Attacks Data Center Apps).

"Azul is the first company to build a separate standalone box that can be linked to the network," says Rich Partridge, lead analyst for enterprise computing platforms at Ideas International. By offloading Java workloads to processors in the Azul devices, the servers' own processors are freed up to work on other workloads, he adds.

Read all the details at NDCF.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-Gen Data Center Forum