Customized appliances preloaded with your application

reduces costs and increases reliability  and deployment efficiency for global application rollouts

The strategic partnership between Dell and TCPWave creates a next generation appliance, with unsurpassed scalability, security and availability. Our appliances are customized to meet any customer specific and site specific requirement. We defy the logic used by our competitors which adopts the one size fits all model for running mission critical applications for all customers. We also defy the logic of engineering silos wherein different components of the system are engineered by different teams. We cater to the customer's application engineering requirements by providing a stripped down Linux operating system on a powerful and reliable multi-core x86 Dell appliance for a global rollout. The superior quality of the Dell hardware is backed by a state-of-the-art Dell QA testing of each component in the appliance and with Dell professional experts ready to resolve any customer related issue. This value add from Dell provides a core success fabric to our customized Dell appliances. The application level customization that is done by TCPWave to meet the client specific design requirements adds layers of expertise and value which is unsurpassed in the industry. We are experts in customizing the authentication, authorization and accounting modules on the appliance. We can plugin to the customer's existing authentication mechanisms such as LDAP, Active Directory, Radius, TACACS+, Safeword and SecureID authentication. Our appliances don't need local user accounts or system administrators manage them. We deliver a cost effective solution that is simple to install and requires virtually no maintenance. The security fixes, which are specific to the application, can also be customized for an instantaneous deployment or a phased deployment.

On top of the authentication customization, we also do customization to the fault management modules, performance management modules and configuration assurance modules. We are experts in integrating smart logic into the appliance to alert the customer's fault management system with our SNMP traps. Our generic MIBs can be custom tailored to make an application that does not have any SNMP intelligence into a smart-alerting and self healing appliance. Our SNMP module can also report an application specific KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and can create charts for reporting and forecasting. Finally, our configuration assurance tools provide visibility to ensure that all the Dell appliances are installed and configured the same way and that the configs do not change over time.

Our customized Dell appliances start with a stripped down version of Linux kernel with minimal configuration. We eliminate any and every software component that is not required for the application functionality. We then harden the kernel. Customer specific applications such as media delivery, DNS, sendmail, LDAP, middleware components, redundant servers to assist in Low Latency transactions etc are built on top of the TCPWave's stripped down Linux operating system. Our product developers provide custom code to meet any client specific requirement that is currently lacking on the existing deployment. Our collaborative agreement with Dell allows us to take this offering to the next level. The Dell Custom Factory Integration team creates an OEM Appliance image after the design is finalized with the customer. Extensive system testing is performed in the Dell QA labs and the appliance is sent to the customer for UAT testing. We can build and deliver hundreds of exactly configured custom appliances in over 101 countries within 48 hours. The customized appliances can also be stored in a Dell warehouse to meet an aggressive Service Level Agreements (SLA).

We can assist in reducing the application server operating cost by eliminating the software installation, configuration, administration, downtime, user management and irrelevant patch deployments. Organizations of all sizes have made the decision to migrate their business-critical *NIX workloads to Linux. The customized Dell/TCPWave appliance deployment requires a high-level migration approach and strategy. Contact our sales engineers for more information. We also have a case study of a large Fortune 10 financial institution, that has successfully migrated to our customized appliance and is currently deriving performance, efficiency and cost benefits.  Contact us for additional information.