University of Nevada, Reno

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As the university expanded, the need for business intelligence grew substantially. Its existing data warehouse was overwhelmed by the volume of queries, and loading financial data took as long as two hours a night. Upgrading to Sun Fire servers increased query speed five-fold, sped up the loading of financial data and improved scalability to meet future demands. "We made the right choice for our data warehouse servers," says Lisa Saichompoo, Software and Systems Manager for The University of Nevada, Reno. "Choosing Sun servers has greatly contributed to the success of our data warehouse."

Saichompoo points to the technical reasons for the improved performance. "We boosted our I/O speed by a factor of 10, from 100MB per second to 1GB per second, and that has helped tremendously," she says. "I don’t expect to see a drop in performance anytime soon." Saichompoo also appreciated the ease of transitioning to the new environment. "We run a pretty lean team here," she explains, "and I can't afford to have the data warehouse down. Making a smooth transition was important, and Sun Fire servers delivered."

The university chose Sun servers for their reliability and durability, as well as the performance, scalability and security offered by the tight integration of Oracle database software and Sun servers and the Solaris operating system. Sun's Upgrade Advantage Program (UAP) enables the university to receive a substantial trade-in allowance by upgrading from its Sun Enterprise 5000 servers to newer Sun models. The university can deploy just the right amount of processing power needed simply by adding one or more UltraSPARC III or UltraSPARC IV processor boards to the Sun Fire E2900 chassis. Saichompoo notes, "Our outstanding experience with the previous Sun servers, as well as the recent performance improvements due to the new Sun Fire servers, make me confident that our data warehouse infrastructure can handle whatever happens over the next five years."