AMD Singapore

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To accommodate rapid growth and demanding production schedules while upholding AMD’s reputation for quality and innovation, AMD Singapore needed to build its business on a high performance, reliable and scalable IT infrastructure. Among its absolute requirements was a server infrastructure that supports round-the-clock operations at optimal speed and performance, and with no downtime. To keep the production lines humming, AMD Singapore also needed tools to diagnose and fix application-related problems as quickly as possible.

Sun was the natural choice for AMD Singapore, largely because of their close technology partnership, which has resulted in multiprocessors—the AMD Opteron™ processor—optimized to run on Sun servers and with the Solaris 10 Operating System. The built-in stability and security of both Solaris and Sun x64 servers offered AMD Singapore the performance and reliability it requires. In addition, the facility uses an Oracle 10g database, and since Oracle develops software on Solaris 10, AMD is confident in continued compatibility of future releases of Oracle and Solaris. Additionally, AMD viewed Sun as a consistent technology leader whose solutions offered the best investment protection.

Approximately 60 Sun Fire V40z and V20z servers equipped with dual-core AMD Opteron processors and running Solaris 10 support an Oracle 10g database, an in-house, business-critical application that serves as the backbone of the manufacturing line, Sun StorageTek and Solaris 10 software and Veritas NetBackup. A Sun StorageTek 9990 System provides disk-based backup of the Oracle database. Sun Professional Services provided implementation services and project management for Sun servers and storage, as well as gave AMD Singapore’s IT staff the training and skills necessary to manage the Sun infrastructure.

Technology collaboration between AMD and Sun has paid off and is serving the Singapore facility extremely well. Optimization of Solaris 10 with AMD Opteron processors provides maximum performance and near-linear scalability for systems such as the facility’s Oracle database. Several Solaris 10 features are fully exploited by the Sun Fire multicore systems. Memory placement optimization improves system performance. Solaris Containers, which allow multiple applications to run in isolation from one another on a single system, provide AMD Singapore with granular management of resources at the core level. The result: The facility has experienced a 50 percent performance increase in its business-critical applications even while the load has increased by 300 percent.

Additionally, using Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), IT staff is able to troubleshoot and tune applications in near real time to avoid performance bottlenecks in its production systems without having to modify applications, thereby slashing problem diagnosis and resolution from weeks and days to hours and minutes. During system testing, AMD Singapore used DTrace to gain insight into a performance problem with its Oracle database that it wouldn't have otherwise been able to diagnose. Additionally, in a 24x7 environment, where uptime is critical, the Sun solution has helped AMD Singapore avoid downtime altogether. Thanks to improvements to its active-active server cluster configurations with the Sun Fire servers, AMD Singapore has improved system availability, performance and scalability.

The scalability of the Sun solution easily accommodates the facility’s growth, providing long-range investment protection and peace of mind that allows AMD Singapore to focus on building innovative solutions and speeding time to market.