Sun Professional Services Experts Help Streamline Deployments and Lower Total Management Costs for Rapidly Changing Business Needs: Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of Sun Rapid Solutions, a new set of solutions designed to meet rapidly changing business needs. The three solutions were developed by Sun to target specific customer network infrastructure requirements around global web buildout, datacenter efficiency and high performance computing. “Today's market challenges drive the need to demonstrate business return on investment,” said Amy O'Connor, vice president, Services Marketing, Sun Microsystems. “Sun's Rapid Solutions combine our portfolio of products with services that get customers on the fast track to deployment and help them remain focused on building their business.” Businesses are under increasing pressure to reduce cost and complexity while also staying focused on providing value for their customer base. Based on standardized IP architecture and using Sun hardware and software, Sun's Rapid Solutions are prearchitected and preconfigured solutions that can be deployed quickly and cost effectively. Sun's new family of services offer affordable options for customers who want to improve IT efficiency by simplifying management of traditional PC environments, helping to ensure proper identity controls are in place, and scaling existing infrastructure to accommodate growth, system availability and performance needs. Sun is leveraging its “reusable artifacts” - including proven methodologies and best practices to provide a package of optimized solutions that helps enable customers to achieve maximum productivity and get to market faster. The solutions are supported by Sun Professional and Learning Services to enhance the customer experience and help ensure long-term satisfaction. Sun Rapid Solutions: * Sun Identity Provisioning, is a pre-architected solution providing automated and centralized information access control for a growing remote worker population. It enhances IT security via audit trail reports and can lower help desk costs by at least 35 percent by delivering robust system-wide provisioning for HR synchronization and end user self-service. The solution includes hardware, software and services, with optional availability through the Sun Customer Ready Program. * Sun Managed Virtual Desktop provides a complete and fully integrated virtualized desktop solution offered as a Service, to deploy, host, manage, service and support, a customer's desktop environment. It dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of maintaining a desktop environment while improving security, mobility and flexibility. Customers can get more than 40 percent reduction in TCO with less than one year investment payback. Positioned to scale from a single department to the entire enterprise, Sun's solution is built from predefined architectural building blocks which reduces deployment risks and simplifies management. The building-block approach can also be used for phased implementation and capacity expansion. The service supports Microsoft Windows, Solaris OS and Linux as desktop environments. Customers have a choice between the Starter Kit for quick tactical deployments and the Enterprise offering with full enterprise high availability features and benefits. * Sun Compute Cluster, is a simple, reliable, scalable and open solution for compute-intensive data processing which is supported by Sun professional and support services to streamline implementation and optimize performance. Targeted toward small and medium-sized organizations, Sun Compute Cluster provides modular processing power, reducing the complexity of IT decision-making, sales quote time, deployment time and lowering risk. The new solution includes a pre-configured HPC compute infrastructure, consisting of 4 base configurations that can be used as building blocks, and a Linux OS-based software stack. The entire system, including both hardware and software, can be assembled through the Sun Customer Ready program. The solution provides flexibility to choose from tested configurations to address scaling, power and faster time to deployment.