Customer Profiles and Quotes

AT&T Labs' Internet and Networking Systems Research Center collaborates with other AT&T business units and external partners to design and analyze network protocols, study internet protocol (IP) routing and switching, network architecture and system infrastructure, and perform many different types of network traffic measurement, modeling, and analysis.

AT&T Labs Research currently stores more than 12 terabytes of network measurement and analysis data that are used in all aspects of IP network research. This data and the resources to process it are central to AT&T's core business. Therefore, AT&T Labs is very interested in high performance computing platforms and data warehouses, driven by significant internal expertise in database design, data mining and visualization.

"The Sun Fire system is attractive to us because it provides significantly increased processing power, I/O bandwidth, scalability, and improved system management features -- all of which are critically important in building usable data warehouses," said Fred True, AT&T Labs researcher for Internet and Networking Systems.

"We have found the performance, scalability, robustness and easy management of the new Sun Fire platform provide the greatest benefits to our computing environment," added True. "We've observed a significant leap in performance compared with our current processing platforms. Most of our application benchmarks show a 'wall clock' speed increase of two and a half to three times. This has a great impact on the types of processing we can do and on how we design our applications. Sun's improvements in CPU performance, e-cache size, memory bandwidth, memory latency and I/O throughput all contribute to our ability to develop more sophisticated and high performance applications."

During its beta testing process, AT&T Labs observed memory bandwidth of the Sun Fire server at rates very close to the system's 9.6 GB/sec limit. "The memory bandwidth is very impressive and will prevent us from experiencing bottlenecks due to cache coherency and memory access traffic."

"With few exceptions, our applications require a balance of system resources, including CPU, memory access, and I/O bandwidth. The balance designed into the Sun Fire server allows us to sustain optimal throughput of all our applications and thereby extract the most from our server resources."

In addition, seamless scalability of AT&T Labs' processing platforms is very important to avoid constant re-architecture of processing facilities. The board-level compatibility of Sun's new servers allow AT&T Labs to grow from modest to large systems while preserving its investments over the long term.

Another way AT&T Labs sees the Sun Fire system protecting its investment is through binary compatibility between many of AT&T's applications on all of Sun's previous platforms. "This binary compatibility saves us a potentially huge amount of work to keep our legacy tools and applications running. All the applications we tested -- over 25 custom applications -- ran without recompilation on the Sun Fire server."

Maintaining high system uptime as well as the ability to test prototypes on system domains within a server is also of critical importance to AT&T Labs researchers. "While we're not a true 'production' environment, the analyses we do are extremely important to our partners. Also, many of our prototypes are transformed into production systems during their lifecycle. Prototyping on a system that meets the availability requirements of a production environment allows us to transition seamlessly from prototype to production system without changing platforms."

When AT&T Labs researchers team up with various AT&T business units or other external groups, resources are often shared during the course of a project. "Using dynamic system domains allows us to be very nimble in our ability to allocate processing and storage resources, thus allowing us to manage our partnerships more flexibly, without dealing with the long timeframes that typically govern the acquisition or reassignment of processing resources."

"Finally, remote management has been a major issue in the research environment at AT&T Labs, based on the way its systems and administrative resources are distributed. The ability to manage the Sun Fire platforms remotely over the network will allow us to manage our systems anywhere without having to be physically present on site -- and also allows several people to jointly manage the platforms from different locations. This is a key factor in enabling us to share personnel and hardware resources across disparate workgroups."

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Bloomberg LP, one of the world's leading financial information providers, collects, sorts and delivers critical financial and business data to more than 155,000 professional systems around the world. Bloomberg currently uses Sun's Enterprise (TM) 10000 servers to power their Ticker Plant.

Bloomberg was selected to test one of Sun's new Sun Fire (TM) Servers and according to Mark Purdy, Application Manager for the Bloomberg Ticker Plant, "Sun Fire is Sun's best foot forward for the future. As a user of large Enterprise 10000 systems, the Sun Fire server provides a solid growth path."

The Sun Fire server's performance is equal to and surpasses the performance of our existing systems in every respect. "The new Sun Fire server line will provide us the kind of growth path we need to stay competitive in today's online world," added Purdy.

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British Telecommunications plc is one of the world's leading global providers of communications services. Its key activities include local, long distance and international telecommunications services, mobile communications, Internet services and IT solutions.

"We've been beta testing the new Sun Fire server and have been pleased that the server has been running very reliably, allowing us to install and run benchmark applications based on Oracle 8i, Oracle 9iAS, Veritas Volume Manager and the Forte C compiler without any problems," said David Seddon, UNIX® TP & Database Manager for British Telecom.

"I'm in the position of evaluating new open systems platforms (hardware, operating system and databases) for performance and scalability for BT," added Seddon. "We have 1750 operational UNIX servers running in a heterogeneous environment, so it's important that our Sun systems run reliably and efficiently with other platforms and operating systems. In the future, we're considering using Sun Fire servers as database servers, and they might be used for server consolidation - where lots of applications on smaller servers can be placed in a domain or partition of a larger Sun server. This could reduce floor space used in our computer centers, which means reduced cost of ownership. Another potential benefit of the new Sun Fire servers is in the use of Capacity On Demand - to be used with domaining and partitioning features."

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Compagnie Generale de Geophysique is a leading worldwide supplier of seismic acquisition, processing and reservoir services & products for the Oil and Gas industry. Operating in sometimes very remote and challenging areas, CGG requires versatile and proven high performance solutions.

In the field of seismic processing, CGG produces and uses its industry standard Geovecteur package, adapted to heavy-duty 3D processing, advanced imaging and reservoir characterization, as well as seismic acquisition Quality Control. Sun servers have been among the high performance servers supported by Geovecteur for years, and, as part of a joint effort between Sun and CGG, the application is now available on Sun Fire servers.

"Sun's new Sun Fire server is a simple machine, yet flexible and powerful," said Laurent Clerc, IT Architect at CGG. We are confident in Sun's ability to deliver these new products, and are pleased with the capacity of the new UltraSPARC III processors and the new generation of Sun servers to accommodate our ever increasing processing requirements. The Sun Fire server seems particularly well adapted to transaction-based operations and heavy I/O loads, providing improved interactive response time.

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Danish Technical University is the leading center of engineering education and research in Denmark, and is one of Northern Europe's largest technical universities. The DTU has about 8,000 students today, with 14,000 users accessing their network based on Sun Microsystems computer systems.

Henrik Madsen, Professor of Statistics at DTU continues to play a key role in researching and selecting systems for the mathematics department's computer lab. "Using computers such as the new Sun Fire server will enable us to solve problems that we are not able to solve today. Using Sun Fire along with our existing line of Sun Ray appliances and Sun servers, will help us be a leader in many research areas related to HPC applications. At the DTU, we'll be running High Performance Computing (HPC) code, including chemistry, Gaussian, Computational Fluid Dynamics and weather modeling code, as well as developing air pollution models and more," said Professor Madsen. "We also collaborate extensively with companies worldwide including Aerospatiale, APV, Danfoss, General Motors, Grundfos and Nokia for commercial applications, as well as Vestas and NEG Micon, the two largest wind mill manufacturers in the world."

"We get the most flexible system available that is also easy to maintain - it's a total system that is what we think is an ideal future computing environment," added Professor Madsen. "That environment will allow us to have Sun Ray appliances on the desktop connected to the network with "fat" SMP servers such as Sun Fire, and it just works -- quickly and reliably. This combination gives us tremendous improvements in solving the size of problems we have, and helps us maintain the system easily. We are able to solve much larger problems for less money today."

Additionally, the DTU works closely with other centers of excellence around the world, where it can contribute new and improved methods related to dynamic systems (simulations and estimation) and interval arithmetics.

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As the leading provider of managed Web and application hosting services, Digex tested the Sun Fire server extensively in its Unified Engineering Lab. "Sun continues to evolve its server product line to meet the specific requirements of our high-volume production environment," said Charles Boyle, director of research and development for Digex. "The high-performance Sun Fire server's architecture provides Digex with a flexible solution to meet our clients' rapidly changing e-businesses requirements.

"Enhanced serviceability and reliability features of the Sun Fire server, including redundancy and partitioning, will help us to maximize site availability. Clients using the Solaris 8 Operating Environment will be able to seamlessly and easily migrate to the new Sun Fire platform, while retaining their investments in applications and development. This new system addresses critical needs of service providers and our clients alike.

"Overall, the new Sun Fire server will enable us to more effectively fulfill the mission-critical e-business requirements of our clients. The scalability of the new system combined with the reliability, performance and serviceability enhancements make it a powerful addition to our e-business platform."

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One of the leading technical universities in Europe, the University of Technology Aachen is also home of one of the biggest SMP (symmetic multiprocessing) cluster implementations in the world. The University of Aachen runs integrated graphics and GRID-type computing applications to support compute-intensive applications such as, for example, large computational fluid dynamic simulations. With the computing power of 2.3 teraflops, to be installed in 2002, the supercomputer at Aachen is Sun's largest technical installation to date in the area of High Performance Computing (HPC).

"We chose Sun's new Sun Fire servers for their broad software base, computational power and versatility, said Christian Bischof, Professor for high-performance computing and head of the computing and communication center at RWTH Aachen. This will allow us to champion new HPC application areas and function as a computing portal for researchers at the university and the state through the computing cooperative that is being established in the State of Northrhine-Westphalia. Sun's seamless scalability from the desktop to teraflops greatly simplifies computing for both our scientists and engineers."

The University of Aachen will be installing 32 Sun Fire servers over the next two years, beginning in April 2001.

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