Credit Suisse has taken a stake in Azul Systems, a California-based start-up that has developed technology for processing compute-intensive memory-sapping applications over a shared network infrastructure, and says it will use the equipment to reduce the burden on its datacentre servers.
Azul's 'network attached processing' systems are designed to deliver compute and memory resources as a shared network service to applications built on the J2EE Java platform as well as other virtual machine languages.
Credit Suisse is the company's second customer to go public and the first in the financial services industry. The investment bank has declined to disclose the size of its stake in Azul Systems. It says it will use the technology to move to a utility-based computing model and to simplify its IT environment.
Wall Street investment banks have made big investments in blade server racks to manage their resource intensive transaction processing applications, but are increasingly constrained by the astronomical costs of cooling the heat-generating kit.
Network-attached processing doesn’t replace the application server per se, but the Java workload is offloaded to the Azul machine, enabling the datacentre to increase capacity on-demand, rather than by maintaining over-provisioned blade clusters.
Alan Freudenstein, managing director at Credit Suisse says of the company's investment in the business: "The fact that Credit Suisse led a significant investment round in Azul Systems demonstrates our belief in, and support of, the kinds of solutions that Azul is bringing to Wall Street."