| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer Software and Hardware |
| Founded | 2002 |
| Headquarters | Sunnyvale, California, United States |
| Key people |
Scott Sellers, CEO, President, and Co-Founder |
| Products | Computer software |
| Website | http://www.azulsystems.com/ |
Azul Systems, Inc., a privately held company, develops runtime platforms for executing Java-based applications. Founded in March 2002, Azul Systems is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Slough, United Kingdom; Tokyo, Japan and Bangalore, India.[1]
Contents |
Azul produces Zing, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and runtime platform for Java applications that is designed to remove memory limitations and scale elastically. The company was formerly known for its Vega Java Compute Appliances (JCAs), specialized hardware designed to massively scale the usable compute resources available to Java applications. Zing utilizes and improves on the software technology developed for the Vega hardware.[2]
Zing became generally available October 19, 2010. The product includes a JVM, management tool and monitoring tool[3] Zing is based on established technology from Azul that allows existing Java applications to scale to dozens of CPU cores and hundreds of gigabytes of memory 'elastically', meaning resources can also scale up and down based on real-time demands, and without garbage collection pauses present in other Java runtimes.[4]
The Zing JVM is 100% Java-compatible and based on Oracle HotSpot.[5] Where a typical Java Virtual Machine uses static heap sizes and reaches a practical size limitation due to garbage collection pauses, the Zing JVM implements Azul's C4 (Continously Concurrent Compacting Collector) garbage collection software technology, allowing heap sizes of hundreds of GBs without pauses.[6] Zing also utilizes Azul's technology for elastic memory, which allows memory heaps for Java instances to grow and shrink based on load.
The Zing Resource Controller is a tool for systems administrators that provides a high level view of Java application infrastructure[7] and automatically scales memory heap size up and down dynamically as applications require.[8] This dynamic heap scaling removes the need for most JVM and GC tuning.
Zing Vision provides low overhead production visibility of running Java applications using statistical information that is already available from processing occurring within the JRE.[9]
Zing is available for Linux and Solaris, and requires x86-based hardware with Intel Nehalem or AMD Opteron processors.[10]
Azul's Java Compute Appliances (JCAs) were designed to massively scale up the usable compute resources available to Java applications. A proxy Java Virtual Machine (JVM) installed on the existing system will transparently redeploy Java applications to the Azul appliance, the latest version of which, the Vega 3, can contain up to 864 processor cores and 768 GB of memory.[11]
Azul Systems was founded by Scott Sellers (now President & CEO), Shyam Pillalamarri (VP of Engineering), and Gil Tene (CTO). The first compute appliances, offered in April 2005, were the 960, 1920 and 3840, consisting of 96, 192 and 384 processor cores, respectively.[12]
Stephen DeWitt previously held the position of CEO.[13]
Azul Systems was approached in 2005 by Sun Microsystems, who offered a licensing deal for patents it claimed Azul had violated.[14] In March, 2006, Azul Systems sued Sun Microsystems, asking a U.S. District Court in northern California to rule on the issue of patent infringement. In May 2006, Sun Microsystems sued Azul Systems in federal court in San Jose, CA, claiming patent infringement and violation of a non-competitive agreement with former Azul CEO, Stephen DeWitt, also a former Sun employee. Both parties agreed to the terms of an undisclosed settlement in June 2007 prior to either suit going to trial.[15]
Based on public filings[16], Azul has raised more than $200M in financing to date.
| Date | Type | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 2003-01-22 | Series A | $7,000,000 |
| 2003-03-04 | Series A | $1,027,162 |
| 2003-05-29 | Series B | $13,572,021 |
| 2004-05-19 | Series C | $34,999,994 |
| 2005-02-16 | Series D | $29,473,400 |
| 2006-01-13 | Series E | $42,189,628 |
| 2007-05-31 | Bridge | $10,016,758 |
| 2007-08-30 | Series F | $40,552,043 |
| 2007-12-04 | Series F | $18,557,590 |
| 2008-11-26 | Series 2 | $9,408,124 |
Major investors include Accel Partners, Austin Ventures, Credit Suisse, Meritech Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Velocity Interactive Group, and Worldview Technology Partners.[17] ComVentures and JVax Investment Group have also invested in Azul.[18]
Azul Systems released Zing 4.0 in October, 2010.[19]
Azul Systems released the Vega 2 7200 Series, in June 2007. The 7200 series contains up to 768 processing cores on 16 processor chips with 768 GB of memory. Azul designed the 48 core Vega 2 processor chip. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) fabricated the Vega 2 processor.[20] Notable companies utilizing the 7200 series include Credit Suisse, Wachovia, British Telecom, and TransUnion.
Azul Systems released the Vega 3 7300 Series in May 2008. The 7300 series contains up to 864 processing cores with 768 GB of memory.[21]