We’ve been busy adding new clients as quick as we can. Often with a new client comes a new point of sale system we need to support. The process for supporting a new POS involves installing a copy of the software on the lonely test computer in our office, a re-purposed quad core desktop computer.  The problem is that we are bringing on so many clients & POS systems that our poor test computer is struggling with the load of multiple virtual machines constantly being accessed by our development and testing teams. So far we’ve built support for or are in the process of supporting POS systems like Maitre’d (7 &8), Halo, Volante, Micros, and Positouch. With so many new systems we tried splitting the load onto two computers and adding as much RAM as they could handle to no avail. It was time for a new system.

Enter the Dell Poweredge R900 server: 100 pounds of American computing muscle! Seriously though… it took two people just to carry it into the office. This machine, originally built for scalability and data-demanding enterprise applications, should be more than enough to run dozens of Windows environments for each POS system simultaneously without breaking a sweat. For you spec geeks out there this machine has 4 Xeon CPUs with 6 cores each for a total 24 cores along with 64GB of ram and 4 hard drives at 10k RPM setup in a RAID 10 configuration.