WINNER
Azul Systems Inc.
Azul Appliance
The Azul Appliance is a unique network-attached hardware system that is designed to tackle heavy computational demands in todays business application development environments.
Azuls (www.azulsystems.com) appliance has an innovative multicore silicon architecture that enables each unit to support as many as 384 processor cores in fully SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) mode and 256GB of shared memory. The judges were impressed with Azuls innovative scalable hardware design and optimized compute resource management features.
Using a transparent virtual machine proxy technology, Azul provides an unbound resource for Java, J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) or .Net workloads. Because Azuls appliance architecture does not expose its binaries to the applications, the system is operating-system-agnostic, with the potential to reduce deployment complexities in heterogeneous environments.
Azuls powerful on-demand and unbound compute capabilities are expensive, however: The appliance costs $80,000 to $100,000 or more.
FINALISTS
DataSynapse Inc.
GridServer Virtual Enterprise Edition 4.0
DataSynapses GridServer provides a robust virtualization environment that can be easily integrated on top of existing applications and infrastructure. This finalist enabled a broad set of enterprise applications to run on an on-demand shared infrastructure in large enterprise companies.
Judges liked GridServers automated application provisioning and load balancing, which reduced deployment complexities and boosted application performance. The policy-based framework directs workload priorities over heterogeneous resources, allowing business applications to respond better to changing needs.
Go to www.datasynapse.com for more information.
Netezza Corp.
Netezza Performance Server 8025
Netezzas Netezza Performance Server 8025 helps large companies solve complex analyses quickly compared with legacy data warehouse systems.
NPS 8025 combines database, server and storage in a single system, providing a single repository for business intelligence data. The NPS system can be equipped to handle terabytes of data and to perform complex analyses quickly and efficiently.
Judges applauded Netezzas Intelligent Query Streaming design, which places processors in close proximity to storage devices. This capability allows the system to process records as they are read from the disks and captures relevant information for each query, thereby improving performance.
More information is at www.netezza.com.
Excellence Awards Winners and Finalists:
- Analytics & Reporting
- Application Development
- Business Integration Systems
- Business Relationship Management
- Desktop & Mobile Hardware
- E-Business Foundations
- E-Mail Management & Security
- Enterprise Collaboration & Messaging
- Enterprise Storage Hardware
- Enterprise Storage Software
- IT Quality Assurance Tools
- Productivity Applications
- Server Hardware
- Networking & Management Tools
- Networking Infrastructure
- System & Application Management
- Authentication & User Management
- Network Data-Stream Protection
- Vulnerability Assessment & Remediation