Rahul Sharma (Editor)

Azul Systems

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Type
  
Private

Products
  
Computer software

Founded
  
March 2002

Azul Systems httpslh3googleusercontentcomoYXwC279kTkAAA

Industry
  
Computer Software and Hardware

Key people
  
Scott Sellers, CEO, President, and Co-Founder Anya Barski, Vice President of Engineering Eric Graber, Vice President of Sales Gil Tene, Vice President of Technology and CTO, Co-Founder

Headquarters
  
Mountain View, California, United States

Motto
  
Java for the Real Time Business

Founders
  
Scott Sellers, Shyam Pillalamarri, Gil Tene

Profiles

Five minutes with scott sellers ceo azul systems


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 London, United Kingdom; Saint Petersburg, Russia and Bangalore, India.

Contents

Azul systems interview replacing oracle with a more cost efficient erp system


Products

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.

Zing became generally available October 19, 2010. The product includes a JVM, management tool and monitoring tool. 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.

Zing is compliant with the Java SE standard and is based on Oracle's HotSpot. Where a typical Java Virtual Machine uses static heap sizes and reaches a practical size limitation due to garbage collection pauses, Zing implements Azul's C4 (Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector) garbage collection software technology, allowing heap sizes of hundreds of GBs without pauses. Zing also utilizes Azul's technology for elastic memory, which allows memory heaps for Java instances to grow and shrink based on load. This dynamic heap scaling removes the need for most JVM and GC tuning. Zing also incorporates ReadyNow! technology to shorten warm-up time and avoid de-optimization during runs.

The Zing Vision tool provides low overhead production visibility of running Java applications using statistical information that is already available from processing occurring within the JRE.

Zing is available for Linux, and requires x86-based hardware with Intel Nehalem or AMD Opteron processors.

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.

Open Source

Azul distributes and supports Zulu and Zulu Enterprise, a certified binary build of OpenJDK. The initial release in September 2013 supported Java 7 and 6 and ran on Windows 2008 R2 and 2012 on the Windows Azure Cloud. On January 21, 2014, Azul announced Zulu support for multiple Linux versions as well as Zulu Enterprise, which has subscription support options. Support for Java 8 was added in April 2014 and Mac OS X support was added in June 2014. In September 2014, Zulu was extended to support Docker. Zulu Embedded, which allows developers to customize the build footprint, was released in March, 2015.

Developed for manufacturers in the embedded, mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) markets, each Zulu Embedded build is verified by Azul using the Java Community Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) and incorporates the latest OpenJDK bug fixes and security patches.

Azul produces the jHiccup open source performance measurement tool for Java applications. It is designed to measure the stalls or "hiccups" caused by an application's underlying Java platform.

Company history

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.

Stephen DeWitt previously held the position of CEO.

Azul Systems was approached in 2005 by Sun Microsystems, who offered a licensing deal for patents it claimed Azul had violated. 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.

Finances

Based on public filings, Azul has raised more than $200M in financing to date.

Major investors include Accel Partners, Austin Ventures, Credit Suisse, Meritech Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Velocity Interactive Group, and Worldview Technology Partners. ComVentures and JVax Investment Group have also invested in Azul.

Production systems

Azul and Microsoft announce Zulu Embedded for Windows IoT on October 26, 2015, providing a certified OpenJDK-based Java development and runtime environment for Windows 10 IoT Core.

Azul announces early access program for Zulu supporting Java 9 on October 26, 2015.

Azul Zing version 15.09 was released on October 20, 2015.

Azul announces on 7 October 2015, Zing available as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Web Services.

Azul joined Canonical’s Charm Partner Programme, Juju, on July 22, 2015 and released Zulu charms.

Azul Zulu 8.7 was released in May, 2015. It added support for Oracle Enterprise Linux and incorporated the latest OpenJDK updates.

Azul Zulu 8.4 was released October 31, 2014. It added Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite support; DEB packaging, Apt-Get repository distribution and Docker for Debian Jessie and Wheezy (7.x) releases on Intel x86-64; and new Zulu Docker containers for Debian and CentOS.

Azul Zing version 14.09 was released in September, 2014. This version added Java SE 8 support, support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 and Ubuntu (operating system) 14.04 LTS, memory module AutoBuild for flexible Linux version support, and added the ability to save and reuse accumulated compiler optimizations between runs.

Azul Zulu Dockerfiles Docker were made available on the Docker Hub in September 2014.

Azul Zulu for Mac OS X was released in June, 2014.

Azul Zulu version 8.0 with Java SE 8 support was released in April, 2014.

Azul Zing version 5.9 was released in March, 2014. The major new feature was de-optimization control, called ReadyNow!.

Azul Zulu for Java 6 and multiple Linux versions was released in January, 2014.

Azul Zulu was released in September, 2013. Zulu is a supported build of OpenJDK. The initial release runs on Windows 2008 R2 and 2012 on the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Zing Platform Edition with WebSphere was released in May, 2013. The product integrates IBM WebSphere Application Server with Azul Zing.

Zing 5.5 was released in October, 2012 with enhanced memory leak detection and support for Amazon EC2 and VMware-based instances.

Zing 5.2 was announced in April, 2012 with support for Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS (Ubuntu Linux) and new management tools for controlling deployments with multiple Zing JVM instances.

Zing 5.1 was released in February, 2012 with support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server).

Zing 5.0 was released in November, 2011 and was announced as the company's first fully native JVM for Linux (Linux).

Zing 4.1 was released in May, 2011, adding support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 5.1 (JBoss Enterprise Application Platform). The company indicated this was their first 'bare-metal' implementation.

Azul Systems released Zing 4.0 in October, 2010.

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. 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.

References

Azul Systems Wikipedia