Azul gets Oracle appserver badge

AZUL SYSTEMS, one of the most interesting of recent server companies, has taken another step forward by gaining certification on Oracle's Application Server 10g.

Although Oracle once tried its hand at appliances with its Raw Iron dedicated database server project, it has no plans to go the extra yard and put its name on the tin. That pleasure will be left to Azul, which develops what it calls the Compute Appliance, accelerating Java virtual machine performance on servers that tap up to 16 Vega 24-core processors.

Oracle's logo can now be filed alongside those of JBoss and BEA Systems on Azul's appserver tick-list and the firm said it is working patiently through the terms and conditions to fill the IBM-shaped hole in its roster.

"We've been working with IBM on WebSphere but, IBM being the multi-headed company it is, there is potential for conflict," said Shyam Pillalamarri, Azul co-founder, referring to a possible political clash with IBM's server hardware division.

Oddly enough, Azul's Oracle certification will arrive first on IBM's AIX Unix flavour rather than Sun Solaris, the platform on which many Oracle licences are sold.

Azul is led by former Sun executive Stephen DeWitt and the firms are currently engaged in a legal tussle over intellectual property. But Pillalamarri said that the pause before Solaris certification would only be a few weeks and doing AIX first was more of a technical challenge to itself rather than a snub to Sun.

"Trying to bring an application onto AIX was always a bugbear," he added.

Speaking of the Azul-Sun legal stand-off, Sun recently disclosed a possible further clue as to its reasons for the Azul pursuit.

In a NetworkWorld article, Sun said it has a five-year-old project underway called Maxwell that is intended to make hardware run Java faster through memory tricks such as better garbage collection and object management.

As an engineer notes, the closest thing currently on the market is… Azul.