Engineering DataXpress

Solution Provider Increases Developer Productivity with Solaris 10

Engineering DataXpress is a global leader in data interoperability solutions for commercial electronic design automation (EDA) environments, providing 82 off-the-shelf data interoperability products including data transfer development tools and data translators.

Customer Challenges

Speed up qualification process to less than a month
Improve developer productivity
Identify operating system of choice for the EDA industry

Solution

Engineering DataXpress qualified its UNIX products for Solaris 10 using 400MHz Sun Ultra Workstations and 2.4GHz Sun Java Workstations featuring AMD Opteron processors.

Business Results

Qualified products for Solaris 10 in ten days
Sped up full regression testing from four hours to less than 4 minutes
Provides 33% faster platform than Windows XP on a dual 3.2GHz Pentium 4

Products and Services

Story Details

Developer productivity in migrating solutions to new operating systems is a critical factor for success in the quickly evolving electronic design automation (EDA) industry. “Every time another OS is supported, it costs the EDA developer community a significant amount of money,” notes John Eurich, President and CEO of Engineering DataXpress. “With all of the choices available, and the number of Linux versions increasing, we’re trying to identify which platforms are the best ones for our industry, and commit to provide and support products on them.”

Engineering DataXpress qualified its UNIX-based products for Solaris 10 on both AMD Opteron and SPARC platforms in less than 10 days. The qualification process proved to be the easiest the company has ever done, taking 50% less time than budgeted. The qualification involved building 16 combinations of the company’s 63 UNIX products. “It was the easiest port we’ve ever done,” says Eurich. “And transparency! It’s tremendous to run an operating system on different processors and have the environment be functionally identical. We don’t have to be as careful with memory management using the Solaris 10 OS—it has always been good about going virtual. Other platforms use it and hang. Engineering productivity on Sun workstations has also improved noticeably using the Sun Java Desktop System software. Our engineers used to switch between environments to do debugging, but they’ve been staying on the Sun Java Workstation.”

" The level of support is one of the technological advantages of doing business with Sun. They have always been a good company to work with. They’re accountable. "

— John Eurich, President and CEO, Engineering DataXpress

The performance of the new platform has enabled the company to use regression suites not employed since the early 1990s. With one-fifth the number of test files than today, the full regression suite used to take four hours to run. On a Sun Java Workstation powered by the AMD Opteron processor, the full regression test took only 3.43 minutes. “The Solaris 10 OS running on Sun systems featuring the AMD Opteron processor are the fastest UNIX platforms we’ve used,” concludes Eurich. “Speed, transparency, support, virtual memory, and the Java Desktop System software make Solaris 10 our operating system of choice. It’s lean, mean, and mature. From a business point of view, it makes sense for the electronic design community to use the Solaris 10 OS—especially EDA vendors who should deliver and support products for it. My recommendation to the industry is everyone should jump on it now.”