Software firm gears up to meet sales demand

By ADAM GIFFORD

Peace Software has bought 30 SGI 1100 Linux servers to meet the needs of its fast-growing development staff.

Development vice-president Ross Mathieson said strong North American sales of the company's Energy utility billing software was resulting in Peace adding about 15 staff a month, half of them developers.

"We've been using our [SGI] Origin 2000 supercomputer for development, but we now have 200 developers and we will run out of capability unless we upgrade," said Mr Mathieson.

While the core application was now fairly mature, each customer in a new state or province brought new regulatory requirements which must be built into the software.

Each Linux server has two 1000 MHz processors and two 18 gigabyte hard drives. All 30 servers are able to be mounted in the same rack.

Each server will be used by up to 15 developers, with the servers managed in a clustered environment so that spare drive capacity can be allocated where needed.

Peace is also adding 1.7 terabytes of Hitachi Data Systems disk array storage.

Systems engineering manager Hamish Archer said the Linux servers would give all developers their own development "sandbox" to work in, where they could run their own complete instance of the Energy application, including the BEA application server and an Oracle database back end.

"As our development team grows, we can add Linux servers incrementally to support them rather than having to commit to the purchase of a single, much larger Machine," Mr Archer said.

"By moving the bulk of our development work on to the Linux servers, we will free up our existing SGI Origin 2000 to be used for testing large-scale deployments of the Energy application."

Mr Archer said some customers ran components of the application on Linux, but for the foreseeable future the major database tier would continue to be run on large-scale Unix hardware.

Mr Mathieson said the servers were being installed in a new data centre in the former National Bank Building adjoining Peace Tower in Symonds St, Auckland.

To cope with its expansion, Peace was taking six floors of the building. It would retain two floors in Peace Tower, as well as renting project space as needed.

Mr Mathieson would not reveal the price paid for the new hardware, but said it reflected the size of the deal and the long-term relationship Peace has with SGI. The list price for one SGI 1100 is about $12,000.

A Peace project team, headed by Mr Archer, is at SGI headquarters in Mountain View, California, where it is performance-testing latest generation SGI hardware in preparation for an expansion of the Energy system already installed at British Columbia Gas.

SGI New Zealand regional manager Scott Houston said SGI was working closely with Peace to ensure its application could handle utilities with more than a million customers.

He said the 1100 line, introduced in January, was now discontinued as SGI concentrated on Intel's IA 64 architecture chips.

"That's the reason the price was very competitive."