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Scale Abilities Delivers Enterprise Linux Clusters to Close Premium Finance |
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Data-centre grade database computing delivered at commodity prices
London, England – February 15th, 2005 Today, Scale Abilities announces the successful implementation of true data-centre grade reliability and availability at Close Premium Finance, the UK’s leading provider of finance to the insurance industry. Scale Abilities, a specialist UK consulting company, provided key architectural and implementation skills, as well as some novel engineering concepts to ensure the project’s success.
All IT directors want to take advantage of commodity computing for cost reduction. But the heterogeneous mix of hardware and software vendors creates serious challenges for implementation and support.
Scale Abilities designed a hardware and software architecture for Close Premium Finance that disconnects much of the reliance on the hardware vendor, and maximizes uptime. Coining the phrase ‘Disposable Computing Architecture’ for the first time, James Morle, director of Scale Abilities Ltd, spoke of bridging the gap between proprietary servers and the trend towards commodity solutions:
“The Disposable Computing Architecture is an exaggerated term to describe a rapid deployment methodology pioneered at Scale Abilities Ltd. We can deploy industry-standard servers from cardboard to cluster in just 10 minutes. This alleviates the need for expensive integration engagements and long repair turn-around times, putting the customer back in control.”
“Scale Abilities were critical to the success of our implementation.” said Jonathan Cattle, Director of Technology and Planning at Close Premium Finance. “Their experience in the enterprise computing market and unparalleled problem-solving skills carried the project through with incredible efficiency. Their architecture design has provided us with a flexible and reliable platform, and their mentoring and training has left us well equipped for the future.”
An essential component of rapid deployment and service is finding a stable and supported combination of high-quality hardware and software. Scale Abilities aligned with PolyServe, Inc. to deliver a high-availability (HA) Linux cluster for CPF’s Oracle 9i database. PolyServe Matrix Server is the industry leading Linux cluster file system. The Oracle HA solution pack from PolyServe provides five-nines failover protection and tight management integration with Oracle for improved operational efficiency. Scale Abilities knew they could count on PolyServe Matrix Server for easy deployment and a stable production environment.
“Scale Abilities was essential for the integration and deployment at CPF,” said Gordon Bookless, VP of Customer Success at PolyServe. “Their Disposable Computing Architecture created a clean and fast deployment.”
The problem of heterogeneous support agreements was greatly mitigated at Close by the Problem Triage Service support agreement offered by Scale Abilities. Essentially cradle to grave problem ownership, problem triage removes the burden of finding fixes from the customer.
About Scale Abilities Ltd: Scale Abilities is a specialist UK consulting and training company, focused on Oracle database servers, but with a unique and comprehensive capability across the entire software and hardware stack, and a solution-centric approach. Please refer to www.scaleabilities.co.uk for further details, or email
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About PolyServe: PolyServe, Inc. is a leading developer of shared data clustering software for Linux and Microsoft Windows mission-critical data centers. The company’s products reduce the cost and complexity associated with traditional clustering approaches, while offering superior scalability, availability and manageability. In addition to its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., PolyServe has a Microsoft development center in Redmond, Wash. It also has sales and support offices in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, London, Minneapolis, New York, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. For more information about PolyServe, visit www.polyserve.com, or call 877-476-5973.
About Close Premium Finance: Close Premium Finance leads the UK premium finance industry in product innovation and service and has been voted ‘Best Premium Finance Provider’ by brokers eight times in the past eleven years. The company belongs to the
Close Brothers Group, which is one of the UK’s 200 largest companies by capitalisation, with assets totalling more than £2.7 billion. The company offers a full range of products for both personal and commercial premium finance, helping a large range of clients including some in the FTSE 100. |
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