Digital Marketing Firm Installs Microsoft HPC Solution to Simplify IT Operations
Atlas offers digital marketing technologies that help advertisers maximize Internet campaign investments. The company uses high-performance computing (HPC) applications running on hundreds of parallel server computers to process data gathered from marketing campaigns across the Internet. By 2005, managing these servers had become cumbersome. Maintenance and configuration tasks were largely done by hand, and these manual processes could not keep up with the company's growth. Atlas also wanted to improve the reliability and security of its HPC clusters. In response, Atlas deployed Microsoft® Windows® Compute Cluster Server 2003. Although deployment is ongoing, Atlas has already simplified IT management by automating administrative tasks and by supporting a more efficient schedule of jobs on the servers. Improved reliability has contributed to a 20-percent increase in IT labor efficiency.
Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Atlas provides agencies, marketers, and publishers with the technology and services they need to execute fully integrated online marketing campaigns.
Business Situation
Atlas needed to simplify and automate the management of hundreds of clustered server computers. Manual maintenance procedures were not scaling to meet the company's growth.
Solution
Atlas deployed Microsoft® Windows® Compute Cluster Server 2003 and made particular use of its administrative features, including job scheduling, node management, and Remote Desktop for Administration.
Benefit
Simpler IT administration
Improved IT reliability and efficiency
Stronger IT security
More flexible and scalable IT infrastructure
Software
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2
Quote
"With Windows Compute Cluster Server, we don't have to spend as much time troubleshooting or recovering jobs that have failed, so our IT labor efficiency has improved by 20 percent."
