Bladewatch.com

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/blog/archives/2008/05/highperformance.html

Java’s popularity – according to IDC, more than $11 billion, or 20% of worldwide server spend, was devoted to Java servers in 2005 and analysts estimate that number is growing 15-20% annually – is sweeping the Street, at least according to anecdotal evidence. “There are four areas in which we’ve succeeded in the last 18 months: derivatives trading, risk analysis, hedge funds and foreign exchange,” reports Ram Appalaraju, vice president of marketing at Azul Systems, maker of a Java acceleration appliance used by many large Wall Street firms. “The reason they prefer Java is the cost of development in Java is a lot cheaper than any other programming environment.”

The Achilles’ heel of Java applications is that they can be subject to performance issues such as garbage collection (a periodic cleaning out of memory that can take several seconds to complete). Programs that deal with large data sets — such as trading and risk analysis applications — are particularly prone to Java performance bottlenecks. “The applications pause, they need to reboot the machine, all those things cut down on either the volume of trades, the closing or the risk analysis that cannot be computed in real-time,” Appalaraju says. “So they end up providing data to the portfolio managers that’s two hours if not one week old.”

An interesting article talking about the Azul appliance. I remain a big fan of the Azul platform, the ability to have an appliance, a shared processing device (so to speak), which can do my Java workload could be great for specific applications or functions, and quite possibly less resource intensive and ‘high’ maintenance than a blade farm, as with anything, the application code needs to be optimized for the platform – very cool.

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