APPLICATIONS

Sun Microsystems today announced that more than 100 new Solaris Operating System (OS) customers have tested or purchased the innovative new Sun Fire T2000 servers running the UltraSPARC T1 processors with patented CoolThreads technology. eBay and EDS participated in the Sun early access program to purchase the servers, which provide the highest performance and throughput in the industry, with anticipated savings of millions of dollars in power, cooling and space costs. CoolThreads technology allows eBay, EDS, Air France and other enterprise customers to help reduce the number of servers in the data center by up to 75 percent. The new server line is anticipated to save these enterprises an average of $371,000 in power and cooling costs for 100 servers in just three years. What's more, the technology is designed to double or triple a customer's data center capacity without increasing its size. Other benefits customers may experience include improved IT responsiveness, greater service levels and better reliability due to less heat generation, increased security and 20-60 percent fewer physical parts than competing systems. EDS EDS provides a broad portfolio of business and technology solutions to help its clients worldwide improve their business performance. EDS' core portfolio comprises information-technology, applications and business process services, as well as information-technology transformation services. Testing the Sun Fire T2000 in its current infrastructure provided some astonishing results. "We are pleased with the cost, throughput performance and power economics of the Sun Fire T2000 servers," said Larry Lozon, vice president, Data Center Services, EDS. "Reducing power consumption in our data centers is crucial. During our initial testing, we experienced a 50 percent decrease in server power consumption. We are seeing server power consumption as a critical cost factor in serving our client's data center needs. These 32 thread processor-based servers will be a major component within our Infrastructure Transformation service offering, providing an ideal landing zone for platform re-hosting and technology refresh of high-throughput workloads. This will lay the foundation for a tech refresh strategy focused on improving our client's application performance while reducing space and power consumption in EDS data centers." NTT DATA NTT DATA is the largest systems integrator in Japan. With its vision of "Global IT Innovator," NTT DATA is committed to using IT to shape the affluent society of the future, a place where information can be accessed at any time and in any place. NTT DATA has been developing and operating across a broad front, ranging from nationwide systems that formed the cornerstones of a society to a multiplicity of corporate network systems. For these critical platforms, their requirements have always been reliability, scalability and better price/performance. "We are pleased to see that Sun Microsystems has announced the new Sun Fire CoolThreads server family product line," said Mr. Shinichi Yamada, senior vice president, System Platforms Sector, NTT DATA Corporation. "Having evaluated the UltraSPARC T1 processor, we found the high throughput, efficient power usage and affinity with the Java Application Server makes it ideal for the core platform of the online systems we develop and operate. With its high availability and high performance, we are sure that the combination of Sun's advanced technology and NTT DATA's System Integration capability makes it possible to offer optimum solutions with high value add for our customers." Fiducia IT One of the leading systems integrators for the banking industry, Fiducia IT AG hosts the IT infrastructure for all of the cooperative banks in half of Germany. Their huge data center boasts one of the biggest Java-based applications in the world, called agree, which is based on Fiducia's Java Banking Framework (JBF). More than 100,000 workstations and 20,000 ATMs are connected to 800+ Sun Fire v440 servers. After testing the Sun Fire T2000 and comparing its performance against other leading platforms, Fiducia IT was convinced that the T2000 was the right system for the future. "Unpacking the box we couldn't believe a 32 thread server could be so small," said Matthias Schorer, chief architect at Fiducia IT AG. "But after running our own benchmarks it's pretty clear that looks can be deceiving. With the Sun Fire T2000 servers we'll be able to replace our current servers at a rate of 4:1 while doubling our performance. And if that's not enough, it looks like we'll be able to cut our energy use from 5.2 to .35 kw/hour. That's a factor of 14. Amazing!" NEC Corporation NEC Corporation is one of the world's leading providers of Internet, broadband network and enterprise business solutions, dedicated to meeting the specialized needs of its diverse and global base of customers. Ranked as one of the world's top patent-producing companies, NEC delivers tailored solutions in the key fields of computer, networking and electron devices, by integrating its technical strengths in IT and networks, and by providing advanced semiconductor solutions through NEC Electronics Corporation. "We are very glad to hear that Sun has announced the UltraSPARC T1 systems," said Toshiro Kawamura, senior executive vice president and member of the board at NEC. "We evaluated a major ERP application on UltraSPARC T1 and have gotten good performance in our initial results. We expect this new product to contribute significantly to the growth of our system integration business, both in web applications and in other application areas such as ERP." Pricing and Availability Sun is shipping the new Sun Fire T2000 server with CoolThreads technology immediately. Pricing starts at $2,995 (U.S. list price).