Azul Systems is going with the herd, which is congregated down around Linux, commodity x86 hardware, Big Data, the cloud and the cloud's little friends PaaS and SaaS because that's where the business is.

The latest spin of Azul's Zing JVM is just for Linux.

The company's not going to be OS-agnostic anymore, and offload workloads from different operating system onto Zing. Nope, it's converted completely to Linux.

It's the third time Azul has changed its faith. It used to preach that scaling Java apps required Vega, the fancy $200 million proprietary rig it built around exotic multi-core chips. Then last year it saw the light and said it could all be done in Zing software. Its new stuff is advertised as the industry's only JVM specifically architected and optimized for Linux and, being the fifth generation from the first Vega machine, it's styled Zing 5.0.

CEO Scott Sellers reckons that Azul and Java's owner Oracle are the only commercial providers of enterprise JVMs for enterprise Java apps left and, like a sign Azul may come to regret, it was elected last week along with Twitter to the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee.

Anyway, Zing is supposed to scale unaltered applications up (and down) to 512GB of memory with the promise of pause-less operation, sit stride dozens of x6 processor cores, and whittle Java deployments to 90% fewer instances on bigger JVMs in the name of server consolidation.

In SaaS applications, Zing is supposed to support 3x more users, sustain 5.7x more throughput (ops/sec) on distributed caching and in-memory data stores, and claims 18x more concurrent users on portals and e-Commerce workloads while improving response times by 7x.

The Zing JVM is based on the Oracle HotSpot JVM and pricing is based on an annual subscription per server.