Designing the right solution is no mean feat. One may have to go out of way and come up with the rare to win the tough race. It was thus not very easy for everyone to win a deal from Magna Steyr. This automotive engineering company had a very complex requirement that was quite tough to be fulfilled. The company wanted to set up a high-end compute facility at a very affordable price.
The single server that Magna had been using was not sufficient to run high-end calculations. “Processing speed as well as memory was a big problem for us. The time taken for high-end calculations was too high. We were exploring for a solution wherein we needed high processor speeds and scalability, at an affordable price,” says Shailesh Patil, Head - IT at Magna Steyr.
As expected, Magna was soon approached by a number of SIs, who represented various vendors like IBM, Sun, HP, and Dell. While this would have led to a fierce price war under normal circumstances, three out of the four vendors gave up the fight. The reason was indeed interesting. None of them could suggest anything other than a cluster environment to the customer, whereas the only thing that Magna didn’t want was a cluster farm! The only SI who finally came up with an alternative was Leon Computers, an HP partner, who eventually won the deal.
The Right Mix
In the beginning, even Leon was not able to come up with anything other than a cluster farm to address the various requirements of the customer. “A cluster environment would be very complex to configure and manage. It would also require immense expertise to run. Besides, the software licensing cost would be extremely high. So we were clear that we would not go for a clustered environment. Our requirement was to get the best performance out of single core that in turn gives high processing speed and a large amount of memory for some high-end and complex calculations,” explains Patil.
While the competitors could not come up with a better solution, Leon decided to spend more time and effort. “We explored various options and discussed with many people in the industry about more possibilities. A few of my friends in the US suggested to me a company by name ScaleMP, which has no presence in India,” says Rahul Meher, Founder of Leon Computers.
Though the vendor had no direct presence India, the team at Leon realized that it was the only option they could look at. With ScaleMP’s solution, multiple physical systems appear to function as a single logical system. This can be called as aggregation, or the opposite of partitioning or server virtualization. And to Meher’s joy and relief, the vendor was more than happy to make its first sale in India and thus helped the SI with all its needs.
“Both IBM and Sun proposed a clustered environment, whereas Dell did not show much interest from the beginning itself. The solution proposed by HP and ScaleMP was definitely much better as it offered better results on an x86 platform,” says Patil. Leon suggested a solution based on virtual SMP foundation, through which the customer could leverage the benefits of a traditional SMP compute system over a spread of multiple physical compute servers. The fact that Leon took more than three months to do the research and come up with a solution speaks volumes about the effort and time it spent for the customer. Magna, interestingly, was left with no options other than to wait for Leon’s solution.
Virtual Case Study
Though Leon was able to come up with a better solution, it had no Indian case studies or success stories to share with the customer as it was the first implementation of ScaleMP in the country. The global case studies shared by ScaleMP, though threw some light on the new software, did not help in convincing the customer. Besides, Leon was not in a position to show a proper PoC to Magna as its testing environment was not running on ScaleMP. However, the SI immediately arranged a demonstration, thanks to the web-conferencing tools implemented at Leon. HP and ScaleMP jointly did a demo for the customer and shared the results with them. However, the customer was not completely confident to go for an entirely new technology that was not tested before.
“The biggest question in front of me was whether this technology would work or not. Though it looked very attractive, nobody had so far spoken about this technology in India. We did not get a chance to do hands-on testing as PoC was not possible. I had no idea whether the proposed solution would deliver better results than a clustered environment. We had a better understanding of the solution when we saw the demo over the web conferencing,” explains Patil.
He, however, knew that he would be taking up a risk by going for something that’s completely new and thus asked for the evaluation copy of the software. While ScaleMP was not ready to give that, it assured Magna that if the software does not deliver the expected results, it would give the entire money back. This finally built up Magna’s confidence and they decided to go for ScaleMP along with HP.
Tough To Execute
Once again with the help of web conferencing tools, Leon Computers got three of its engineers trained on the new technology. However, the implementation was not an easy task. First, it was a completely strange technology for Leon to work on. Besides, ScaleMP had no presence in India and thus no people to help Leon on the implementation part. Communicating with the vendor was thus a tedious process. Since Magna did not have web conferencing tools implemented in its office, Leon had to depend completely on tele-conferences and emails to communicate with ScaleMP from the implementation site.
Besides, Leon also had a tough deadline of three weeks to deliver the solution. “Our engineers had to work round the clock and even for 48 hours continuously many times. We in fact did a lot of trial and error. We first started with Suse Linux and later faced a lot of issues with it. ScaleMP helped us fix a lot of these errors. But beyond a point, we decided to give up and this alone wasted almost 15 hours of our time. When we eventually shifted to RedHat Linux, it worked smoothly,” recalls Meher.
Patil is now happy with the results post the benchmark and is confident that the system would provide what he wanted. “I feel the risk was worth taking as the system is delivering the expected results. Leon played a very vital role in coordinating with ScaleMP, which otherwise would have been difficult to explore, besides understanding the requirements, discussing the solution and implementing it on a war-footing,” endorses Patil.
Leon now has a successful model, which it expects, can be replicated for many of its customer organizations. The company is now planning to buy a few licenses from ScaleMP and set up a testing environment at its premises. “A cluster solution would have given us better margins. But that was not our aim at all. Today, we have a proven model, which can be implemented at many of our customers in the engineering and automotive sectors. Moreover, we are proud of being able to come up with something that none of our competitors could even think of,” concludes a proud Meher.
