Next Steps

What next?

We’ve covered a lot of different areas in this Detailed Buyers Reference. Hopefully some of the information presented here has helped you to better understand your cluster requirements as well as some of the options available to make your Aspen cluster purchase best fit your needs.

Your Aspen sales engineer is there to help you navigate the choices necessary to define the best possible solution for your needs, not some hypothetical standard cluster user. Your sales engineer will work with you through the quoting process, helping you every step of the way, and adjusting your configuration to meet your budget while achieving the best possible technical solution within the constraints you specify. This process often entails multiple quotes and requirements review sessions with your sales engineer to help you define your system more and more tightly.

Your sales engineer will furnish you with two more documents with your first quote(s) or shortly after. They are the Aspen Configuration Guide, and the Statement of Work for your specific order. Both documents can be accessed as web links or downloaded from our web site for your convenience.

We ask you to fill out and submit a Statement of Work for your system by the time you submit a purchase order. Aspen uses your completed Statement of Work to perform a final detailed engineering review of your hardware and software configuration, matching them to the requirements you outline in your Statement of Work. This process helps to ensure that we fully understand your requirements and can meet them to your satisfaction.

The Aspen Configuration Guide explains the Statement of Work questions in more detail, and provides additional and specific technical advice and recommendations for your cluster configuration. Don’t worry too much if you can’t answer some of the questions in your Statement of Work. Your Aspen sales engineer can help you, or coordinate teleconferences or meetings with Aspen cluster engineers to address these questions. Aspen can even assign a specific cluster engineer to work with you and explain every option in more detail, or perhaps work with other site or organizational administrators you identify to determine your technical requirements and configuration.

Aspen deals with many customers, some with complex requirements requiring specific and involved technical configurations, and others who are well served by our standard cluster implementations. Our process works well for both types of customers, and we will do whatever we can to make your specific Aspen purchase and ownership experience as trouble free and productive as possible. Call Aspen to discuss your clustering needs today, we stand ready to help you.

We congratulate you for reading this far! Many people will not have the patience to do so, but we hope that this document has provided some useful information and will help you in your cluster configuration and acquisition.

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