With a server farm of six two-way Xeon-based and, at night, up to 34 additional Pentium 4 desktop PCs, zspace's render farm can access a single set of graphical elements stored on another Xeon-based server running Red Hat Linux with 4TB of storage.

Another early adopter is Swimming Australia for its SwimNet records system, which houses over 400,000 records in its database and over 7000 individual results from each new meet.

Swimming Australia upgraded its Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database and re-deployed the application on a new two-way, dual-core 3.43GHz Xeon system with 4GB of RAM. The upgrade reduced batch processing time from 27 minutes to four.

Swimming Australia's IT services coordinator, Regan Harrison, said in the long term, the new platform will let the organization move data processing from the state level down to the local club level, so the work is distributed over a greater number of people and results are available sooner.

Intel Australia's strategic relations manager, Brett Hannath, admitted the processor giant had lost some customers, including hosting company WDG, to rival AMD, but is confident of winning them back.