AWD

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AWD is Europe’s premier independent financial services company. To achieve such success, AWD has always required that its IT systems support strong security, perform reliably, and adapt to changing business needs. For years, Sun servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System have met AWD’s tough requirements, and the company has used its Sun platform to power mission-critical systems. “The high availability, scalability, and flexibility of the Solaris 10 OS are very important to us,” says Horst Stirner, IT project leader at AWD. “It is a strategic platform on we which continue to build key applications.”

AWD recently needed to upgrade its datacenter to handle increasing IT demand. The company decided to take advantage of Sun’s Try and Buy program to evaluate the Sun Fire X4600 server because of the model’s impressive benchmarks and its ability to accommodate up to 32 multicore processors in four compact rack units. “We wanted to see how the machine would handle tough real-world requirements,” says Stirner. “Our x86-based applications running on the Solaris OS, including content management applications from Day Software and Oracle WebLogic Application Server, were able to achieve fast performance using the server’s high-performance CPUs. These tests completely confirmed our high expectations for the X4600.”

Next, AWD tested the X4600 with Windows applications, including a Microsoft SQL Server database application that required 16 hours to perform complex calculations when it ran on a two-processor reference computer system. “We were not disappointed,” says Stirner. “Those same calculations on an X4600 with four processors took only eight hours, and on one with eight processors, they took less than four hours. The conclusion was clear: For SQL-based applications, we would no longer use anything other than the Sun Fire X4600.”

AWD deployed 67 Sun Fire X4600 servers in its central datacenter, and Stirner has been pleased with the performance of both the hardware and the operating system. “The positive experience we had with UltraSPARC systems running the Solaris OS in the past — namely, that we would set up a system and have no difficulties with it for years — is now being repeated on the Solaris x86 OS platform. Given the flexibility and speed of this platform, we now prefer to use it for any applications that will support it.” The company now has almost half of its X4600 servers running the Solaris OS; the other half run Windows. Four X4600 servers are used for Microsoft Exchange Server, and six run VMware ESX Server to support the company’s virtualization environment.

AWD was using virtualization even before the company chose the Sun Fire X4600 server. The previous virtual environment included eight physical servers, but the new environment’s six servers have much more capacity. Stirner says, “We were amazed that a single X4600 was able to handle the load of all of the previous eight servers. Additionally, because setting up a virtual server is now so easy and the X4600 offers such high performance, the demand for new virtualized services has grown quickly, and we’re able to meet it.”

Stirner concludes, “For us, product continuity is important. The X4600 offers the same look and usability of previous models but with higher performance. Vendor reliability is also important, and we know we can rely on Sun — that’s what makes them such a good partner for us.”