OSNews

Had the same good experience with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 (SLES8) and the YaST2 tool makes administration chores a simple enough that a junior admin can do it with little supervision. I work for a large Brokerage house on Wall Street and we were looking to explore the AMD processor for some of our work. Called SuSE since as the article stated they have supported 64 bit computing on the Opteron the longest. We were informed by SuSE that they had a business partner, Systems Solutions in the Downtown NYC area, when we contacted them it turned out they are a couple of blocks form our location. Upon arriving we signed the obligatory non-disclosure agreement, we informed the group from Systems Solutions that we were interested in the AMD version of SLES 8 and were particularly looking to run it in a clustered environment. They asked if we had decided on which hardware platform we wanted to run, which we hadn’t yet. They invited us into their server room where they had 3 IBM e325 with 2 GHz Opterons running and then offered to provide the lead developer in our group a workstation and desk to do his coding and use their 2 of their severs as a proof of concept. Naturally we were surprised by this offer as was the manager from the Line of Business and decided to accepted their offer.

Systems Solutions’ offer saved considerable time in the initial development and testing and while our developer was working at their site their staff came to our location to create the lab to house the future cluster. As it turns out they are an integrator with a vast array of resources at their disposal they even have an electrical firm that they are partnered with that specializes in Data-Center wiring and power and they are also dealer for enterprise level UPS and cooling. After a successful testing of the application we purchased and had Systems Solutions install a 24 node 48 CPU cluster of IBM e325 servers and the configuration has broken every benchmark we have thrown at it. We had the added pleasure of informing the senior management of a rival group within our company that our AMD cluster easily beat their HP Superdome which uses 64 875MHz PA-8700+ processors with 12 less processors and at a fraction of the cost.

While the group was celebrating at the project closing party the EVP from the Line of Business jokingly said to the Project Manager form Systems Solutions, if they could fly him and 5 of his direct reports to a meeting in Florida then they would truly be a full service integrator. Everyone from our company was laughing then the Systems Solutions Project Manager took out his wallet as presented the EVP with his FAA pilots’ license and informed him that he is also the Director for the Flight Department and could have one of the 6 corporate jets ready within an hour. Then the Systems people started laughing, just a scary group of people, and a few days latter the EVP used their Flight Department and said it was the best service he ever experienced.

It was just an all around great experience with a professional vendor and we are looking forward to working with them again.