MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., and BEAVERTON, Ore., Nov. 13 -- Azul Systems, the award-winning innovator behind server appliances that deliver compute and memory resources as a shared network service, and GemStone Systems, the leading provider of distributed data management and virtualization solutions, today announced an alliance to deliver highly scalable and available data grids for extreme transaction processing (XTP). The joint solution will provide breakthrough scalability and performance, allowing faster response times and more throughput to process stateful data in enterprise IT infrastructures along with unprecedented high availability.

The Azul and GemStone solution will scale beyond 300GB of memory resident business data per node in a grid, supporting high data throughput upward of 40,000 writes per second per node, with a simple and cost-effective architecture. The industry-leading performance achieved in data grids by combining Azul's hardware with GemStone's GemFire Enterprise Data Fabric will provide instantaneous application response times to customers without compromising linear scalability.

The solution is designed to address IT performance challenges and data management bottlenecks related to business-critical applications, for example in the capital markets sector, which is faced with increasing reliance on electronic trade execution, growing volume of transactions and rising complexity of instruments. Azul and GemStone are addressing these challenges with high-performance solutions that support real-time order management, trade execution, risk analysis and compliance.

"Technology-enabled businesses are increasingly relying on extreme transaction processing applications to support core operational systems," said Massimo Pezzini, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst. "Emerging high-performance and high-availability technologies for stateful data management are key enablers for XTP applications that must deliver the extreme levels of performance, availability and scalability required by businesses to remain competitive and grow."

"Our customers in capital markets and other business critical transactional workloads are faced with rapidly growing datasets," said Ram Appalaraju, vice president of marketing at Azul Systems. "The innovative solution from Azul Systems and Gemstone provides the most scalable, high- performance enterprise information backbone for managing and sharing application data and deliver breakthrough results."

Azul Systems will provide GemStone's customers with large amounts of highly scalable CPU and memory capacity to scale grid nodes and enable co-location of processing and data with the Azul Compute Appliances. GemStone's GemFire will provide best-in-class data caching, distribution and consistency management along with advanced and automatic failover, failback and self-healing capabilities.

"There is tremendous pressure for enterprises to achieve performance targets (SLAs) consistently as well as better understand the value of their data," said Juan Menendez, senior vice president of business development and alliances at GemStone Systems. "GemStone's GemFire and Azul's hardware provides a high-performing distributed data management solution for greater scalability and simplicity."

About Azul Systems

Azul Systems is a global provider of enterprise server appliances that deliver compute and memory resources as a shared network service to transaction-intensive applications, such as those built on the Java platform. Azul Compute Appliances enable transparent, massively scalable infrastructure to support the business priorities of today's most demanding enterprise environments and deliver increased capabilities, capacity and utilization at a fraction of the cost of traditional computing models. More information on Azul Systems can be found at www.azulsystems.com/.

About GemStone Systems Inc.

GemStone Systems is the leading provider of the Enterprise Data Fabric (EDF), offering data services solutions for enterprise business architects and data infrastructure managers that are building, enhancing or simplifying access, distribution, integration and management of information within and across the enterprise. Founded in 1982, and with over 200 installed customers, GemStone is recognized worldwide for its unique competency and patented technology in object management, virtual memory architectures, high-performance caching and data distribution technologies.

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Source: Azul Systems