TECHNOLOGY WHITE PAPER
Executive Summary The emerging Real Time Business Imperative means your business now must leverage new technologies and high volumes of data to deliver insight, capability and value faster than ever, with near zero tolerance for inconsistent delivery and uneven performance. While Java has been a tried and true platform for delivering business critical applications, it is a general purpose environment, dating back from over a decade ago and unsuited to today s demands. What s needed is a Java that is purpose-built for the demands of today s real time business. One that enables you to focus on delivering new business value and innovation at scale, rather than continually re-tuning. In this white paper, learn how new Java innovations can transform existing applications to business real time, opening up new opportunities, freeing resources and creating a competitive advantage. 2
Line of business technology executives are faced with incredible challenges and opportunities. With the ever-rising bar of business and user expectations, pressure to innovate and deliver has never been greater. This emerging Real Time Business Imperative means your business must now leverage new technologies and high volumes of data to deliver insight, capability and value faster than ever, with near zero tolerance for inconsistent delivery and uneven performance. Java is a key technology for today s Real Time enterprises across a broad range of industries such as capital markets, communications, gaming, online advertising, ecommerce and insurance. And while Java has been a tried and true platform for delivering business critical applications, it is a general purpose environment, dating back from over a decade ago. Today s Java-based solutions are a product of this legacy, often proving to be brittle, inconsistent and inefficient in meeting these new demands -- constraining growth, opportunities and profitability. Businesses are left over-investing in infrastructure while also supporting, tuning and managing production apps. The net result is that they are leaving new opportunities on the table. What if you had Java that was designed to support the Real Time Business. Java that was standards-compliant, commercially proven and purpose-built for the demands of today s business-critical real time applications. Java that was robust, consistent, scalable, agile and self-tuning. Java that enabled you to focus on delivering new business value and innovation at scale, rather than continually re-tuning your apps and network environment. Java that was proven in real-world deployments. Then you could profit by capturing new revenues and real cost savings. And that s what deploying the Zing runtime for Java from Azul Systems can deliver for your business. 3
The Real Time Business Imperative It s everywhere. Your business faces tremendous pressures in every sector and around the globe. Demand shifts continuously and to compete your business needs to innovate non-stop. As customers increasingly move to mobile platforms, you need to deploy robust supporting apps that deliver a consistent experience 24x7x365, especially during peak loads. Any day, in any sector can suddenly look like Black Friday or Cyber Monday or worse yet, another Flash Crash. You face an ongoing war for the best technical talent, software developers, architects and IT staff who chase the latest technology and most interesting projects. Plus, your budget is increasingly constrained and can disappear overnight based on market conditions. What s a Real Time Business? Real time businesses fall into two basic camps. The first is human scale real time timeframes. User interactive applications such as ecommerce sites, customer portals and SaaS must be able to respond to surges in demand without slowing down. An extra second of response time can be fatal. Users get frustrated quickly and can click away easily, costing you business, potential business and customer loyalty. The second is machine-level real time timeframes. These systems need to process information as quickly as it arrives, since even microsecond-level delays can cost money. The ability to process more information in real time for better decision-making, risk management and personalization is critical to businesses in capital markets, online advertising, ecommerce and many other industries. In both of these cases, real time is about expectations and imperatives. Your systems may be subject to strict SLAs with onerous penalties or required to follow simple guidelines to ensure an optimal customer experience. In either situation, your Java applications can t just be fast, they have to be consistently fast. The average response time might be fine, but if your worst case is 10 seconds you have a problem. If your business can t meet these emerging standards, your competitors will, and your customers will notice. Can Java Meet the Challenge? Java has been the default language for enterprise applications for many years. It is ubiquitous, powerful and productive. However, in production it can be very fragile, requiring costly retuning as demands change. Often, your best people are tied up on production performance issues instead of building new features, new apps and new business capabilities that drive revenue. Plus, Java is easier to scale out (by creating lots of small instances) than up (by increasing the size of a few instances). With traditional Java infrastructures application glitches, jitter and stalls can hurt your bottom line. 4
A Better Java What s needed to meet the needs of the modern real time business is a Java that: Meets all industry standards Eliminates jitter out of the box, without tuning Helps drive new revenues Launches your apps ahead of your rivals Delivers better utilization of both your human capital and existing hardware investments Ideally, of course, this new Java wouldn t require you to change a line of code, re-architect, or limit your developers to a subset of Java libraries. Then you could meet the imperatives of a real time business. What you need is Zing, Java for the real time business. Zing is Zing delivers fast execution from machine scale to human scale with unmatched predictability. Zing eliminates disruptions, glitches and pauses caused by the underlying Java infrastructure. Now you can meet all your service delivery standards and provide a better customer experience to drive more revenue. Zing unlocks your company s ability to innovate. By eliminating tuning and making it easy for developers to create data- and transaction-intensive applications that scale seamlessly, your business can get new functionality into production faster. And, you can focus your best developers on creating new capabilities instead of tuning and re-tuning production applications. With better operational and capital efficiency, you can serve more customers on your existing hardware and software and have additional resources available for innovation. The New Performance Standard Zing is the new performance standard for Java. It delivers great performance, all the time, with no excuses. Java s optimizing compilers already generate great code; with Zing, that speed is now available without glitches, pauses or jitter, even when demand spikes. Zing improves the performance of existing applications (even older applications reaching end of life) without coding changes. For the first time your business can leverage the efficiencies of Java for applications where only C/C++ could be used before and gain competitive advantage from aggressive in-memory computing initiatives. Out of the box Zing reduces peak response times to just a few milliseconds. You will immediately see better performance and responsiveness for Webbased (user interactive) applications. Zing reduces max outliers across a wide range from 10s of microseconds in highly tuned trading applications to hundreds of milliseconds in complex Web apps. Consistency: Java s Achilles Heel Java can be very fast, often as good or better than C or C++ in real-world applications. Modern optimizing JIT compilers generate great code. But, we ve all seen what happens. The application runs fine for a while. Then it stops, stalls, freezes or crashes. Restart Graph courtesy of Smart Bomb Interactive 5
Many systems have a typical response time that s fine, but a worst case that is far too high: Zing eliminates these performance issues that your team has spent weeks, or even months, trying to solve: It delivers typical response times of just 10s of microseconds, with sub-millisecond peaks. Unlocking Innovation Real time business has an overwhelming need to deliver competitive advantage and adjust to the changing marketplace fast. Zing helps your development and IT teams deliver more functionality faster. They spend far less time chasing production performance issues with existing applications, freeing up time to work on new initiatives. Zing also allows them to take advantage of the rich array of standard tools and libraries available without creating performance headaches down the road. Many new business opportunities, including Cloud, Big Data, SaaS and others, just don t work well with traditional Java infrastructures. Their lack of scalability and memory limitations prevent companies from launching revenue- and competitive advantage-producing services. Zing makes far better use of today s large-memory multicore servers so you can host more users on existing hardware while also delivering nearly unlimited scalability and supporting very large in-memory data sets. Zing unlocks your company s ability to innovate. 6
The need for speed never ends, and Zing helps you get new business models, strategies and product/ service offerings to market faster with less testing and tuning. It also sets the stage for actionable, real time Big Data and in-memory computing applications that will allow you to react to market changes in seconds or minutes instead of overnight and beat your competitors. Capital Efficiency Zing drives capital efficiency. Today s commodity servers can support massive amounts of memory and multiple cores. This should equate to more speed and better scalability. Unfortunately, most JVMs require you to chop up your applications into small instances to avoid performance issues, making data models more complex, and operations an ongoing headache. Zing is the only JVM that breaks the link between memory size and performance so you can take advantage of all available memory and CPUs on existing servers. It also delivers 2 3X more sustained throughput on existing infrastructure. Zing allows you to scale up rather than out, and put far more users and transactions on the same server, without crashing. Efficiency isn t just about how well you can utilize hardware and software in your datacenter. Your developers are a key resource. With a worldwide war for the best talent, it s hard to hire top developers to fix current performance issues. They d much rather work with the best tools on leading edge challenges that will make a difference for your business and you d rather they did that, too. Zing eliminates the ongoing tuning and performance issues that have distracted your developers, kept them from building new functionality and tempted them to post their resumes on jobs boards. 7
Zing: Zing provides the best raw performance from machine scale to human scale with unmatched predictability. Its built-in scalability unlocks your company s ability to innovate and get new functionality into production faster. Plus, Zing transforms human and infrastructure utilization, allowing you to get more out of the resources you have and free up time and servers for new capabilities that drive revenue. Contact Us Azul Systems, Inc. 1173 Borregas Ave Sunnyvale, CA 94089 +1.650.230.6500 www.azulsystems.com/rtbi info@azulsystems.com Zing was created by Azul Systems, the award-winning leader in Java performance technology. For over 10 years, Azul has been delivering Java runtime and virtualization technology that is proven in missioncritical deployments worldwide. Through Zing your applications benefit from Azul s deep low latency Java production expertise, its ongoing technology investment and rich IP portfolio. Try Zing Today Zing pilots and trials are risk and cost-free and delivered at your site. Our experts will help you before and after testing to set up test cases and evaluate data. You ll quickly realize how Zing can transform the performance of existing applications, help you meet ROI targets, simplify operations and reduce costs. Zing is available for purchase through a simple subscription model, and you will also have access to Azul s world-class support team. Copyright 2013 Azul Systems, Inc. 1173 Borregas Ave, Sunnyvale California, USA 8