Northeast Utilities
Northeast Utilities (NU) operates New England's largest energy delivery system, serving millions of residential and business customers from Maine to Maryland. Headquartered in Berlin, Connecticut, NU employs approximately 6,500 people at 60 different sites in three states. Supporting the company's PC desktop systems falls to a group of two systems engineers and their manager, Gary Rubin. Rubin and his team recently put the NVIDIA® Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) to the test during an evaluation of a new HP desktop system, the HP d325 business PC, incorporating NVIDIA nForce™2 platform processors, which are optimized for the entire line of AMD Athlon™ XP+ processors.
Qualifying A New PC | |
After inspecting a new system, a suite of benchmarks is executed to characterize the system's performance. Next, the team customizes, installs, and checks out software.
Rubin explains, "Performance benchmarks are typically run on the standard system image shipped with a system. For those PCs that meet our performance requirements, we go on to the next steps. First, we customize the system software-it can take up to ten hours to build an image for a new PC platform. Then we load the image and evaluate the compatibility of the system with our software and applications. This step can take up to a week. With a team of only two systems engineers, we are always looking for system platforms that simplify the development, deployment, and management of PC software." |
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HP Compaq PCs and UDA: Shortened Start-Up Times NU proceeded to purchase Compaq D315 Business PCs and was pleased with the results from the start. The system check-out was accomplished in record-breaking time-only three hours to build a custom software image with the NVIDIA nForce drivers. The team completed the process and the HP systems were deployed throughout the company. Rubin and his team were anxious to see if the follow-on HP d325 Business PC would live up to the claims for compatibility. A Single Software Image Now they came to the moment of truth. Would their existing D315 software image run on the new system? To check it out, the team erased the standard Microsoft® Windows® XP image from the disk, and installed the NU Compaq D315 image. The team ended up with a single image that did in fact run on both the new system and the previous system. According to systems engineer Matt Boyajian, "Our image showed perfect stability--requiring no additional profiles. We could physically remove the hard disk drive from the HP d325 system, place it in a Compaq D315, and run it flawlessly. This is the first optimal multi-machine-capable image that we have ever seen. Whenever we have tried this with other vendors' equipment, the images have been riddled with useless drivers and performed unacceptably. The HP d325 with nForce2 was everything that was promised, and more." The UDA Advantage |