ACADEMIA

Sun Microsystems today unveiled the latest version of the Java Availability Suite that now includes Sun Cluster Geographic Edition, a multi-site disaster recovery solution and premier clustering and availability software platform. The new Java Availability Suite helps customers to achieve and maintain high levels of data center availability across unlimited distances during planned maintenance, or in the event of an unplanned event, such as a failure or disaster. The Java Availability Suite with Sun Cluster Geographic Edition provides an end-to-end disaster recovery solution with features including unlimited distance support, use of host and storage based replication techniques, flexibility in configuring cluster pairs and a single point of management. Delivering on Sun's relentless quality focus and following in the footsteps of the highly popular Sun Cluster software, Sun Cluster Geographic Edition provides customers the same easy-to-use management tools and extensive support for the Solaris Operating System and Sun hardware platforms. "With so much depending on your IT infrastructure, disaster recovery and business continuity planning has become a pivotal issue facing organizations today," said Tom Goguen, vice president, Operating Platforms Group at Sun Microsystems. "At $50 per employee per year, customers can now combine the cost-effective aspects of a subscription-based business model with the disaster recovery benefits of the Sun Java Availability Suite for a complete availability and disaster recovery solution." As part of an effective overall disaster recovery plan, financial institutions worldwide require industrial-strength high availability in addition to innovative IT strategies to reduce overall costs. With Sun Cluster at its core, the Sun Java Availability Suite delivers a robust, cost-effective disaster recovery solution. UBS Investment Bank's IT strategy has been to move from mainframes to high availability clusters as it targets new geographically far-flung customer segments. With widespread Sun Cluster deployments, UBS has achieved new levels of availability with a significant reduction in total cost of ownership. "Sun Cluster software offers a highly reliable, stable environment with excellent system performance," Amanul Haque, Director, UBS Investment Bank. "Our ability to sustain high availability, reliability and business continuity is closely tied to the functionality, such as the failover capabilities of the Sun Cluster Software. It is a cost effective alternative solution to mainframes." The Sun Java Availability Suite includes the proven and dependable Sun Cluster software, the new Sun Cluster Geographic Edition, Sun Cluster agents for over 50 industry-leading applications and Sun's award-winning developer tools that are contained within Sun JavaStudio Enterprise, Sun JavaStudio Creator and Sun Studio software. With the Sun Java Availability Suite, enterprises have a choice of solutions to meet the evolving needs of their data centers. From basic single node application restart and two-node fail-over to a full-scale disaster tolerance solution, the suite serves the entire spectrum of disaster recovery needs. In addition, the Sun Cluster Open Storage Program provides choice and helps to protect existing customer investments in their storage options by supporting arrays from multiple storage vendors.