Mention application-specific servers to most people in the industry and they will say that general-purpose servers have sufficient performance to run most applications, and are a good deal cheaper to purchase and support. But the situation may be changing.

New application- and task-specific technologies are still appearing, so obviously some vendors think there is mileage in this approach. Azul Systems, for example, recently completed an important advance in the development of its application-specific technology with the launch of its Vega 2 processor with 48 cores. And BT, in what can be seen as another vote of confidence in this approach, has placed a significant order for Azul Compute Appliances.

The telecoms provider will use the systems to run web service applications, and a utility computing farm for its future IP-based 21st Century Network.

Azul’s speciality is processing Java, and as Java is increasingly at the heart of communications service applications it makes sense for BT to take this route. But Java is increasingly at the heart of business applications too, particularly where there is a move towards a service-based environment.

Azul’s other specialisation is in using its purpose-designed processors – which can be scaled for up to 768-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems with up to 768GB of memory – to run very large applications and datasets in real memory, rather than spending time paging data and code to and from disk storage.

Azul has also developed technology that seems to solve the “Java garbage collection problem”, so Java applications do not get stopped while the system scavenges around for free memory. The upshot is the ability to run extremely large databases, in memory, without any noticeable pause. This is a good thing for any business running large databases, so it suits BT.

This is also a potentially tempting prospect for firms that expect to run applications or services that use large datasets. With the growth of web-based applications, that could be a large proportion of companies.

However, Azul servers are not cheap. Current Azul systems, based on the earlier 24-core version of the processor start at around $100,000 (£57,000) and can cost more than half a million. But they can work out much cheaper in terms of processing power than comparable general-purpose servers – to match a 24-core Azul system, a group of general-purpose servers might cost a couple of million dollars.

And it is unlikely that a group of general-purpose servers could get close to the performance of the Azul system at certain tasks no matter how they were clustered or networked.

However, that does invite the question: how many firms would want a fully scaled up Azul system. Probably not many, but there are many enterprises that might use a small one – say 10-way. The equivalent general-purpose alternative using Intel or AMD dual-core systems with 4GB of memory might need over 100 servers and cost over a million dollars.