First step towards doing business with NATO

Bull has signed a Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA) with NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A). The BOA provides the framework between the two parties to quickly do business together. This agreement between Bull and NATO clearly demonstrates the interest of Bull in the government and defense market.

Under the BOA, Bull is entitled to compete on bids that NATO issues within the range of products and services that Bull focusses on. The BOA between Bull and NATO NC3A specifically mentions the following products and services: Computer Servers, Electronic Data Storage Equipment, Radio Systems, Transmitter and Counter IED, Securised Hardware, Crypto, Security Software, Prefabricated Structures and Container Units and Consultancy. Bull can now compete with all solutions that match these categories.

“Bull is an expert in secure, mission-critical systems, robust infrastructures and applications” commented Saskia Van Uffelen, CEP Bull Belux, “and we are very happy to have completed the BOA procedure.” Bull helps defense and homeland security authorities and organizations take new risks into account, interoperate securely and react more quickly to fulfill their missions. From services (engineering and integration of complex hardware/software systems) to solutions, Bull helps leading players build the new defense technologies of tomorrow. The company has been involved in projects as diverse as the largest European supercomputers for nuclear simulations, warship information systems, mobile tactical systems, remote processing of military devices and radar interceptors, among others.

A BOA is the primary part in a two-stage contracting procedure, whereby the contract is negotiated and placed centrally with a supplier for a specific range of goods. All basic contract provisions are agreed including prices or a definitive pricing methodology. Individual orders for retail quantities may then be placed against the central contract by local offices for local delivery.

by Serge Grauloup, Director of Bull’s novascale/GCOS

Serge Grauloup’s team gets involved in infrastructure modernization projects for big mainframe customers. For many years now, developments and innovations have enabled transactional applications to interact with the open world (Java EE…). The latest innovation? The launch of ‘LiberTP’, a new-generation transaction processing monitor.

© Bull / F. Daburon

Winning back room for maneuver

In many sectors of the economy – from finance and the public sector to transport and telecommunications – whole areas of business activity depend on transaction processing applications. They manage critical operations, such as purchasing, bookings and customer account management, and ensure their integrity, no matter what happens. These transaction processing applications are generally extremely robust and powerful[1], and are designed to meet the specific needs of each customer.

But they are usually written in Cobol or C, and run in proprietary environments which are hardly open at all: a major obstacle when it comes to any kind of evolution. Despite this, transactional applications cannot remain untouched by a trend that is affecting every other aspect of information systems: the move towards greater openness and flexibility, especially with the advent of cloud computing. Naturally, IT Departments are asking themselves how they should be modernizing their legacy applications, with two main concerns: on the one hand, not to risk compromising significant investments and well-proven systems; and on the other, to keep control over their maintenance costs and facilitate greater openness towards the rest of the information system.

To address both these concerns, Bull has designed LiberTP™, a Java EE-compatible transaction processing monitor that lets organizations modernize their legacy transactional applications in a totally controlled framework and, as a result, win back room for maneuver on the financial and technical fronts.

Moving from the client/server era to the post-PC age

Modernizing transaction processing applications is a vital issue. Most existing applications have been written in C or Cobol (it is reckoned that 85% of transactions worldwide are still carried out in these languages) and run on mainframes or in a Unix environment, thanks to the Tuxedo® transactional monitor, integrated with Oracle® Fusion Middleware. However, as the use of Java EE application servers has become widespread, the Java world is becoming increasing powerful when it comes to information systems; so transaction processing has found itself more and more isolated, technologically, even if there is a desire to make it more open.

Financially, that isolation is expensive: supporting a transactional monitor can represent a significant cost, and expert Cobol resources are increasingly scarce and, as a result, costly too. In addition the end of the support of a proprietary transactional monitor on Itanium®, HP-UX® customers has been sidelined.

In technical terms, these transactional monitors were conceived in the 1980s for client/server type architectures, which are no longer appropriate for today’s ‘mobile’ clients (smart phones, tablets) or cloud architectures.

So everything points to the need to adapt transactional applications written in Cobol and C for Java EE environments.

New-generation transaction processing monitor running on AIX ® or Linux: open and ultra-powerful

Based partly on an XATMI transaction processing monitor and compatible with Java EE standards, LiberTP has been designed by Bull’s experts to meet the needs of organizations that want to modernize their transactional applications for the dawn of the cloud computing age. With LiberTP, it is possible to have C, Cobol and Java applications running side by side in the same Java EE technical environment, even in virtualized mode. So with liberTP, businesses can keep their legacy transactional applications, modernize them and develop new applications, freeing themselves from the constraints of languages, operating systems and databases.

Developed in Java and incorporating numerous Open Source elements that have been made reliable and robust by Bull’s engineers, LiberTP puts also the emphasis on performance. At the end of a six-month trial period, one of Bull’s big customers who piloted the solution attested not only to LiberTP’s reliability and robustness, but also that it was twice as powerful as its current application, based on a legacy transactional monitor.

A global specialist in mission-critical systems and Open Source

As Europe’s only publisher of transactional systems, Bull has acquired internationally recognized experience. The Group is effectively one of the key players in the mainframe world – having been the first Tuxedo distributor in Europe – and a pioneer in Java middleware, as one of the founder members of the OW2 consortium. Bull has also developed leading-edge expertise in implementing Open Source components within information systems, having been the first manufacturer in the world to combine Open Source software and intensive production so closely. In particular, Bull has demonstrated at CNAF (the family branch of the French social security system) that it is possible to use PostgreSQL for extremely large-scale, mission-critical applications. The fruit of Bull’s significant investments in R&D, LiberTP is the synthesis of all these experiences.

Rapid application porting

In particular, LiberTP implements a strategy of porting rather than migration, to minimize both cost and risks. This way, the operation does not require any rewriting and has no impact whatsoever on the application or the data it uses. On the other hand, once it is in the open environment, it becomes easy to update and integrate it with other systems, or to add new functionality to it. So porting applications to Java EE using LiberTP can be seen as the first step towards a more global approach to modernizing legacy transactional systems.

To support its customers, Bull has developed a comprehensive methodology based around LiberTP, which starts with an audit of the environment, so as to fully understand its characteristics and constraints. Bull then develops a Proof of Concept, and can subsequently manage the porting project. Everything has been done to ensure the fastest possible implementation, and the whole operation can take place in just a few weeks, in a way totally transparent to users.

Our center of excellence offers demonstrations and large-scale simulations of LiberTP to interested customers. Choosing to port a critical application is a difficult decision, as it may seem to pose too many risks for too few benefits. But with LiberTP, the risks are totally under control, and the direct benefits – as well as, above all, the indirect ones – of a fully modernized transaction processing system, freed from its silo, tend to be realized very quickly.

Room to maneuver for legacy applications

Bull LiberTP safeguards legacy applications and frees them from the shackles of traditional transaction processing infrastructures. Today, many enterprises still base their critical activities on Unix applications written in COBOL and C, to which they have been adding value for years. However, these applications are dependent on client/server technologies that are often complex and costly. With the Bull LiberTP software, over the space of just a few months IT Departments can port their Unix-based COBOL and C applications to a modern application platform built on Java Enterprise Edition. The porting process preserves application performance, data and business logic. After the application has been ported, the enterprise keeps running their COBOL and C code – but on a new open and secure environment. And it can develop additional modules in the Java language. By offering enterprises more room for maneuver, Bull LiberTP enables them to quickly create new services, thereby improving their operational performance.

“IT managers face new challenges created by mobile computing and the Cloud. As a result, they need to adapt their application infrastructure securely and cost-effectively,” says Jean-François Bauduin, Innovative High-End Servers VP at Bull. “We designed Bull LiberTP with the aim of creating more room for maneuver. To achieve this, Bull’s know-how in critical systems design was applied to Java environments.”

A new application platform for the extended enterprise and the Cloud

Bull LiberTP can make corporate transaction processing applications accessible via any mobile device, tablet or smartphone. It effectively meets the needs of transaction processing in a Cloud infrastructure, while ensuring application scalability and high availability.

With Bull LiberTP, transaction processing applications benefit from industry standards and can interoperate more successfully with Java ecosystems, which means they are compatible with a large number of Java-accessible tools via Web services. Bull LiberTP is designed to support customers in porting their applications to a virtualized environment, building on Bull’s partnership with VMware. Applications using Bull LiberTP will have the option to be hosted on Bull’s own virtualized data centre resources, further reducing administrative overheads.

“The new business opportunities enabled by technology trends such as cloud, mobile, social networking and Big Data are pushing organizations to rapidly kick-off a cycle of drastic modernization of their application portfolio,” said Massimo Pezzini, Gartner VP and Research Fellow. “The ability to rapidly adapt established business critical systems to these new realities, while reducing their cost of operations, will prove crucial for enterprises’ chances of long term success.”

Rapid return on investment

Built on a Java Enterprise Edition architecture and benefiting from a simplified subscription model, Bull LiberTP enables organizations to drastically reduce their total cost of ownership for both operations and development. Bull LiberTP greatly simplifies the administration of COBOL and C applications, as IT departments no longer need to maintain heterogeneous environments. They can easily recruit Java-trained engineers, which makes IT operations future-proof at a reduced cost. And applications can now use PostgreSQL as their database.

Keeping modernization simple

Alongside the Bull LiberTP software, the Group is offering a turn-key service to update XATMI transaction processing applications written in COBOL and C; preserving all data, business logic and performance. Bull LiberTP enables the rapid porting of both the client and server elements of Unix-based transaction processing applications.

Building on its extensive expertise, Bull has designed a powerful and secure framework that ensures the continuity of critical applications and enriches them with new features. Legacy applications benefit from the robustness of an enterprise transaction processing system, while opening themselves up to virtualized environments and mobile devices. Transaction processing applications can be ported in just a few months, using a managed and secure process. Operational continuity of service is guaranteed, even if millions of lines of code are involved. Bull LiberTP includes an environment enabling installation, configuration, server generation and the deployment of new services; greatly simplifying the implementation of the solution.

More information : Serge Grauloup’s expert voice

Philippe Vannier – Chairman and CEO, Bull

Technology already generates 30% of worldwide growth. As a major catalyst for differentiation, it is a source of innovation and sustainable development, especially with supercomputers: a field in which Bull has become a leading player with a global reputation over the years.

Quite rightly, the European Commission recently reaffirmed the strategic importance of High-Performance Computing (HPC) to the continent, for the competitiveness of its businesses and the creation of employment. So Europe is planning to double its investment in HPC between now and 2020. Bull – as Europe’s only manufacturer of supercomputers and the world’s first company to bring three Petascale machines into service on two continents – is determined to play a pre-eminent role in this coming drive.

A European Petascale* supercomputer in Japan

After Tera100 for the CEA and CURIE for GENCI and the European PRACE** program – the most powerful supercomputers in Europe – I recently had the honor of inaugurating the Helios supercomputer in Japan. Capable of performing 1.5 million billion operations a second, Helios will play a vital role in the international ITER cooperative program, whose aim is to master nuclear fusion as a new source of energy. Deploying the two Petascale supercomputers, CURIE and Helios, was a real technological triumph: a colossal challenge that our teams tackled extremely successfully and, in the case of Helios, under very specific, multi-cultural conditions in the land of the rising sun.

The need to modernize transaction processing applications

With the launch of its LiberTP solution – a new-generation transaction processing monitor – Bull, as an expert in this field, has opened up a whole new, innovative phase for organizations’ most critical applications. LiberTP effectively adapts these vital systems, in total security, for mobile and cloud environments, while at the same time cutting operational costs and freeing up new room for maneuver.

Our ambition has never changed: to be a trusted partner for our customers, bringing you all the benefits of leading-edge technologies, as these latest developments clearly attest.

Thank you again for your support.

*Petascale: capable of carrying out a million billion operations a second.
**PRACE: Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe.

On March 19, Bull, the CEA, F4E and the JAEA – in the presence of representatives from the EU and the French Embassy in Japan, as well as numerous Japanese politicians (including MPs, the Governor of Aomori province and the mayor of Rokkasho) – have inaugurated the Helios supercomputer in Rokkasho (Japan): one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, delivering peak performance of over 1.5 Petaflops. This is the third Petascale supercomputer designed and developed by Bull to go into operational production in the past 18 months.

In April 2011, the CEA (the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission), acting on behalf of F4E (Fusion For Energy), chose Bull to equip the new data center being built at Rokkasho in Japan, under the auspices of the International Fusion Energy Research Center (IFERC). The data center is one of the key components^[1] of the ‘Broader Approach’; a research program designed to complement ITER and launched in November 2006 as part of a cooperation between Japan and Europe. F4E coordinates the European contribution to the program, while JAEA (the Japan Atomic Energy Agency) is responsible for the Japanese contribution.

Marking this occasion, Philippe Vannier, Bull’s Chairman and CEO, commented: “I am extremely proud that Bull is involved in this very large-scale project aimed at perfecting the use of this sustainable and environmentally-friendly energy source. Our teams have successfully demonstrated their technological and logistical prowess in installing this Petascale supercomputer in under six months, in an area affected by the tsunami a year ago. In the face of extremely difficult circumstances, our Japanese colleagues have demonstrated remarkable professionalism.”

High-density power for research

The new supercomputer has been designed to operate around the clock. Its peak power of over 1.5 Petaflops means that it ranks among the world’s most powerful systems. When it comes to computing power, it features 4,410 bullx® B510 processing nodes arranged in a cluster architecture, incorporating 8,820 Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 processors, with a total of 70,560 processing cores. Helios has a 280 Terabyte memory and a high-speed, 5.7 Petabyte storage system backed up by a secondary storage system designed to support up to 50 Petabytes. The interconnect network within the cluster is based on InfiniBand® technology. Supporting the processing nodes, six bullx® S Series and 80 bullx® R Series systems are used to administer the supercomputer’s operations: from managing the Lustre® file management system to user access. Bull has also supplied 32 bullx® R425 systems, featuring high-performance graphics cards, for pre/post-processing and visualization.  The supercomputer is equipped with the Bull Supercomputer Suite Advanced Edition software, developed and optimized by Bull for Petaflops-class systems based on the Linux® operating system and featuring numerous Open Source components.

A wide range of services: from designing and fitting out computer suites to operational running

As part of this project, Bull has been responsible for designing and delivering the electrical infrastructure and chilled water supply for the liquid cooling systems used at the data center, with the physical infrastructure (the building, transformers, cooling units, etc) having been supplied by Japan. Bull has also installed the supercomputer, and will be looking after its maintenance and operation for a five-year period.

When it comes to delivering these services, Bull is drawing on the skills and resources of its local partner, SGI Japan, Ltd.

More information about Extreme Computing from Bull

More information : Pihlippe Lachamp’s interview on Helios deployment

Bull has implemented yet another Petascale supercomputer, Helios, this time in Japan. Over and above the technological achievement, this has been a huge challenge for the entire team, as Bull’s Project Director, Philippe Lachamp, explains.

What is the story behind the Helios supercomputer and what will it be used for?

Helios will be contributing to a number of major international research programs aimed at understanding and controlling nuclear fusion as a potential new source of energy. In France, the ITER[1] experimental reactor – currently being built at Cadarache – is already well known. But there are other, related projects, including those launched as part of the ‘Broader Approach’ agreement between Europe and Japan, being implemented on the Japanese land. A specialist international research center, IFERC[2], has been set up at Rokkasho in Japan, and it is hosting a data center dedicated to nuclear fusion. The Helios supercomputer is at the heart of that center: it will be used by the various research teams to explore the fundamental questions posed by fusion, like the stability of fusion plasmas and the design of materials capable of absorbing the neutron emitted by the fusion reaction under extreme conditions in terms of temperatures and pressure.

So how was Bull chosen?

The ‘Broader Approach’ is an international program that brings together Japan and Europe, represented by F4E (Fusion for Energy). F4E turned to the CEA – the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission – a world-renowned player in this field – to run an international tendering process and choose the best possible supercomputer, as well as the associated computing environment and services (maintenance and operation for a five-year period). Given what is at stake, the process was extremely strict and rigorous. Bull won the contract, in particular, because of the guarantees we could give that we would be ready for the fixed deadline, in January 2012. The contract was signed in March 2011, and only Bull had the necessary expertise and technical resources to deliver a fully operational Petascale machine in just nine months.

What was the scope of your involvement?

It’s very simple: we were responsible, from A to Z, for implementing a 1.5 Petaflops supercomputer at a site that, in the beginning, only consisted of four walls and an electricity and water supply! So we had to start by guiding a local subcontractor to install the technical infrastructure (electrical network, air-conditioning, UPSs…). Then we had to implement the whole system: in other words, not only the supercomputer itself, with its 2,205 bullx B510 blades equipped with Intel Sandy Bridge® processors, but also all the hardware and software infrastructure needed to use it: file management, scheduling and execution of processing tasks using bullx supercomputer suite, administration, storage, archiving, networks, security, the user portal, visualization tools… Finally, because Bull is also responsible for operation, maintenance and support for the installation over a five-year period, we needed to put in place the essential processes and resources to meet users’ legitimate demands from a piece of hardware like this. Overall, you need to think of it as an end-to-end infrastructure project, where every component is right at the cutting edge in terms of its technical capabilities, performance and robustness.

So how did the project go?

The project team consisted of around a dozen people, backed up by all Bull’s many expert teams, especially the manufacturing capabilities at our factory in Angers. Bull doesn’t have an operation in Japan, so some of the team were dispatched over there, while the rest took their turn to work on the project from their base in France. The time-difference actually proved to be quite an asset, as it meant we could work round the clock in the last couple of months of the implementation.

We also had to tackle the issues of governance, organization and mutual understanding that characterize this kind of international, multi-cultural project. And there were some other surprises too: like when we discovered that in November all the freight traffic between France and Japan was booked up to transport Beaujolais Nouveau! Despite all this, the first processing node was switched on, on 20 October. Two months later, there were 4,410 up and running. Helios was officially accepted, as planned, in December 2011, having clearly demonstrated that we met our commitments with a test running three processing codes on 65,536 cores. Helios went into production on 12 January and will initially be fine tuned by internationally renowned research teams before going into full production in April 2012.

As Helios is now officially inaugurated, what are your strongest impressions as you look back on this adventure?

That it really was just that: an adventure! And that we made a success of it. We’re immensely proud to have built this system – one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers – in such a short time, and under such unusual circumstances. Without doubt, the key to this was that it involved an incredibly solid team, with impeccable motivation: everyone stayed totally focused on the outcome and, throughout the nine months, gave their very best to achieve it. When we were finally able to celebrate our success, one of the members of the team used this quote from Mark Twain to sum up what we’d achieved: “They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!”

For more information about Extreme Computing solutions from Bull

Inauguration of the Helios supercomputer in Rokkasho (Japan)

Video of the installation of Helios supercomputer in Japan

Leids

Unravelling the human DNA is a compute and data intensive matter.  Every human being has about three million DNA sequences, all of which need to be uncovered, verified and processed.  For this research, speed is of the essence and fast I/O is crucial in attaining the required results in an adequate timeframe.  The Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum (LUMC) retained Bull to help design a Big Data storage environment that could meet these needs and requirements.

After an extensive and complex selection process, whereby Bull assisted LUMC in finding, designing and testing the best storage architecture: the Isilon storage systems, now part of EMC. Isilon has a solid reputation in medical research because of its superior performance on data throughput.  Capacity and performance were crucial components in the selection process.  However, LUMC required two other vital components: flexibility and management. Isilon met these conditions, allowing LUMC to create and manage data sets in excess of 1 Petabyte.

Bull and LUMC deployed the Isilon cluster, which consists of four 72NL-series nodes.  This configuration allows LUMC to address almost 200TB of net storage capacity. By using SnapshotIQ and SmartConnect software for load balancing and failover, LUMC is assured of full data redundancy and data recovery functionality.  The complete environment is managed by OneFS, Isilon’s integrated management suite.  The biggest benefit of the Isilon storage system for LUMC is that its research department now features a storage environment that fully adheres to the needs and requirements of DNA research.

More information about Extreme Computing solutions from Bull

ADP Dealer Services International (ADP DSI) is a market-leading supplier of advanced software solutions, computer services and business communications technology to the retail automotive industry.

Traditionally, the company sold its own developed software solution, Autoline, directly to end user organisations. The solutions were subsequently delivered and installed on servers at individual dealer sites. As Autoline is a full ERP System for the automotive vertical, it can be used in a multitude of ways. Typically, it acts as a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, logging all information on customers and their transactions, a back-end system for ordering from manufacturers and suppliers, and a database to store customer service history, accounting and vehicle information.

To be effective, Autoline has to be run on reliable, robust and high-quality hardware systems. To fulfil this function, ADP DSI turned to its existing IT supplier, Bull Information Systems.

Initially, ADP DSI had chosen Bull to supply and run its own internal IT systems. It had been looking for a supplier capable of providing reliable, scalable and innovative hardware systems backed up by excellent support structure and services.  Bull fitted the bill.

ADP DSI’s first purchase comprised a Bull Escala/AIX system and an EMC disk sub-system. The solution, and Bull’s role in implementing and supporting it, proved so successful that Bull was the obvious choice for ADP DSI when it came to addressing its customers’ needs. It decided to use Bull to provide the Escala Server and EMC Storage solutions at customer sites across the UK.

The Emergence of Hosting

Approximately ten years ago, ADP DSI began looking at alternative ways of delivering its applications to customers. It decided to consider the potential of hosting in this context, which amounted to a visionary approach for this industry at this time.

ADP DSI clearly saw the benefits in terms of building customer loyalty. Hosting offers many benefits to companies of all sizes, from one-person automotive workshops to global conglomerates. In particular, it can provide cost efficiencies, ease of scalability, growth and the advantages that come from having expert service, and support, on call at all times.

ADP DSI introduced an application as a service approach and started hosting customers’ IT systems in four highly resilient secure data centres, two located in Bristol and two in Hungerford, Berkshire. It effectively offered its existing customers a choice: either continue to purchase a traditional solution or move to a hosted solution.

Implementing the New Methodology

In the early days of the new approach, ADP DSI grew the application as a service business organically. As demand came in, it scaled accordingly.

Bull played a key role from the beginning of the process in helping ADP DSI transition to hosting with the first Bull cluster being deployed in an ADP Data Centre in March 2000. Bull configured the solution and, working alongside ADP DSI’s IT team, subsequently implemented the infrastructure across all its data centres. Bull was also instrumental in helping to size and scale the solution and incorporating resilience into the hardware.

The systems needed to address a number of issues. They needed to be flexible enough to allow ADP DSI to scale up and scale out to meet demand as and when it came along but also sufficiently robust to cope with issues without interrupting the service. ADP DSI did not only have to manage separate batches of users independently, it also had to deal with a number of different user groups and companies, sharing service and the underlying infrastructure.

ADP DSI decided to continue using the Bull-supplied Escala AIX computer hardware and the EMC storage system which had proven highly successful in traditional implementations.  As with ADP DSI’s transition to hosting, Bull also helped it to implement virtualisation across its data centres in more recent years.

Creating a Virtualised Environment

Specifically, Bull assisted ADP DSI in optimising the use of its data centre servers by ‘virtually’ dividing them into lots of smaller systems, each running independently but sharing the resources of the larger servers.

The use of virtualisation enables ADP DSI to host multiple customers on one server but make certain that each retains its own operating system, which in turn ensures that data is kept secure from every other customer using the centre.

Scoping the Benefits

ADP DSI’s move to IT hosting has brought with it an extensive range of benefits for its customers.

Not only do they gain the advantage of having remotely hosted systems that offer high availability and built-in disaster recovery, they also benefit from low capital investment together with known fixed monthly costs, which give them greater control over both their IT expenditure and overall cash flow.

Customers can also concentrate more attention on their core business and less on the need to manage IT systems. No longer needing to worry about backing up or patching applications, if issues do arise, they are often resolved without any end-user interaction.

In addition, the fact that the hosting is provided by ADP DSI helps cement the trust between supplier and customer. After all, who better to run your software system than the company that wrote it!

Over time, growing numbers of ADP DSI’s customers have seen the benefits and started moving over to hosting. The company now has over 50 per cent of its customers, around 30,000 users, housed within its data centres.

An Evolving Relationship

Bull’s role as an ADP DSI partner has evolved significantly since ADP DSI introduced hosting. Trust between the two companies has increased and the IT requirement has grown, not just for services – important though those are – but also for IT hardware implementation. With the expansion of the four data centres, ADP DSI now has a total of 29 Bull Escala systems and 5 EMC Celerra storage devices across the estate. The systems are robust and resilient, ensuring ADP DSI is now able to offer up to 99.5 per cent service availability.

One of the key benefits ADP DSI has achieved from the relationship with Bull is continuity. With Bull fulfilling a systems integrator role, ADP DSI has been able to grow and develop using the same hardware. As a result, it has had little need for training, no ‘throw it out and start again’ costs. It has just been a natural progression.

ADP DSI has benefited from Bull’s openness in giving it access to its customer centre in France where the Bull R&D team works alongside IBM in the development of the AIX operating system. Within this centre is a Storage Laboratory with engineers who are happy to share their expertise in EMC systems. Having access to this Centre of Excellence has helped ADP DSI to remain fully aware of all the latest product developments and upgrades. This highlights the trust between the two organisations and, once again, it is the customer of hosted services that benefits most from the resulting delivery of enhanced customer services.

More information about Escala