The AMD - EDS Alliance

EDS's reputation for business innovation dates to 1962, when the company defined the concept of technological outsourcing through timeshared processing on IBM mainframes.

Today, EDS focuses on extraordinarily sophisticated technology services for an exclusively enterprise-class clientele. Among top-tier names on the EDS client roster: General Motors, the U.S. Navy, American Airlines, and the United Kingdom Ministry of Defense.

Strategic growth

EDS announced its revolutionary Virtual Services Suite (VSS) in May 2005. VSS is designed to maximize client options by providing enterprise-class services in either 32- or 64-bit applications running on Solaris, Linux or Microsoft® Windows® servers. The AMD Opteron® processor-based Sun Fire servers from Sun Microsystems drive VSS's underlying architecture.

"The performance benchmarks that we've seen from AMD were very important to us," said Reed Smith, EDS product manager for the Virtual Services Suite. "There was no denying the demonstrable benefit when we were able to take the Sun x64 Sun Fire servers and compare them against the competition."

Supporting this premise of utility computing, in which clients pay only for the specific usage they incur, is AMD's forthcoming virtualization technology to be released in 2006. This virtualization technology will deliver an elegant mechanism for running multiple operating systems on a single AMD64-based server with minimal performance penalty.