Blades, Servers, and Workstations Customer Quotes

Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC)

"The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center needed a flexible, cost-effective, high-performance supercomputing environment in order to facilitate a wide range of scientific research, such as ocean and climate modeling, tsunami analysis, regional weather forecasting and applications requiring basic computational fluid dynamics. Sun's new AMD Opteron-powered products, with huge memory, large disk bandwidth and a fast cluster interconnect, comprise an overall cost savings and energy-efficient architecture, making them the ideal systems to drive our compute-intensive work.

--Frank Williams, ARSC Director

Argonne National Laboratory

"IT managers share a lot of the same problems. Using Sun technology in key parts of our organization has enabled us to focus on the things we do which differentiate us from other IT shops. We spend more time on strategic tasks."

--David Salbego, IT Infrastructure Manager, Argonne National Laboratory

Atlantic Computational Excellence Network (ACEnet)

"The Sun Fire X4600 servers greatly advance ACEnet's goal to grow the competitiveness of Atlantic Canada's universities. We especially appreciate the performance, the small footprint, and the striking reduction of energy usage. The end result is a reliable and flexible High Performance Computing infrastructure crucial to our world-class science."

"We are excited by the unprecedented flexibility of the Sun Fire X4600. With 16 cores per server, we can accommodate the needs of both serial and parallel intensive applications with the same infrastructure. This gives us a highly agile High Performance Computing capability,and positions us to compete with anyone in the world."

--Peter H. Poole, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair in Modelling and Computer Simulation, Department of Physics, St. Francis Xavier University

Barwon Health

"As far as we are aware, the Advanced Clinical Computing environment that we are rolling out is unique to Barwon Health, and proof of this is the steady stream of visiting health care professionals and government ministers who want to see this system in action."

--Dr. Charlie Corke, Director, Intensive Care Unit, Barwon Health

Chicago Board Options Exchange

"We gain many benefits from Sun technology and our relationship with its staff. The move to Java and the Solaris OS has been instrumental in not only ensuring strong performance in our IT environment, but also in the sustained growth of our business. In my view, the code is portable, but the relationship is not."

--Gerald T. OConnell, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Chicago Board Options Exchange

Conemis AG

"Sun solutions are among the best technologies in the world. They are dependable, and the support is amazing."

--Charbel Noujeim, Managing Director, Conemis

Daimler AG

"The server products were particularly convincing, especially because of their well-designed heat management, Ultimately, our demands in this regard are very high because of the density of the computers in the server rooms. Favorable heat management provides a long hardware service life."

--Dr. Volker Schwarz, Daimler AG team leader in the Aerodynamics and Aeroacoustics Department

FortiusOn

"As a startup, cost was important, but our application requires intense amounts of computation power. To be successful, we needed an infrastructure solution that was reliable and scalable. Sun delivered with an attractively priced platform that can handle our needs. The Sun Fire X4500 server is the perfect package because it has the right CPUs, the right amount of RAM and the right amount of storageall at a very attractive price."

--Chris Ingrassia, Chief Technology Officer, FortiusOne

Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits

We only use the storage system for the render farm [cluster nodes] it is perfect for this job. Sun tailored the array to our exact requirements. The price/performance ratio couldn't be better.

--Dr. Siegfried Fel, Project Manager for Digital Cinema, Fraunhofer IIS

Frontier Airlines

Sun is more than just a proven player in high-volume Web sites. Sun is also a committed partner that has stayed available to us as we continue to grow and expand the capabilities of our Web environment.

--Bob Rapp, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Frontier Airlines

Gracenote

"Sun helps us deliver a scalable, reliable service that lets us sleep at night because we know that we can rely on the stability and performance of our Sun products."

--Matthew Leeds, Vice President of Operations, Gracenote

Government of Norway

"A key part of the success of this deployment has been the Sun Java Enterprise Systems ease of integration."

--Stein Myrseth, Chief Architect, Software Innovation

Last.fm

"The Sun Blade T6320 server modules with their UltraSPARC T2 processor technology could reduce the energy consumption on our Web-server pool by 40%."

--Mike Brodbelt, Director of Technical Operations and Infrastructure, Last.fm

LinkedIn

"By using Sun products and Sun Professional Services for our solution, we can scale horizontally, and we can scale vertically. And we don't have to change one line of our software code to run dual-core, quad-core, or sixteen-core machines or any other hardware that Sun provides."

--Jean-Luc Vaillant, Chief Technology Officer, LinkedIn

Mentor Graphics

"Design engineers need reliable high performance workstations, and Sun's new Opteron based Ultra 20 M2 is ideally suited for the demanding requirements of Electronic Design Automation"

--Rich Monahan, Director, IT Engineering Services, Mentor Graphics

MathTensor, Inc.

I am urging Mathematica users who want a powerful development or production system to move to Solaris 10 on Sun's workstations and servers based on the AMD processor.

--Dr. Steven Christensen, Co-founder, MathTensor, Inc.

Metaldyne Corporation

If you were trying to run all these applications on other types of workstations, it would take about 160 to do the work that our 40 Sun Blade workstations do.

--Joe Kennedy, Manager of CAE Systems, Metaldyne

NBC

"For each of the past three Olympics, NBCOlympics.com has redefined online event coverage. Through compelling video, up-to-the-minute searchable schedules and listings, live results, blogs, athlete profiles, games and much more, we've taken fans closer to the athletes and games than ever before. We are thrilled to have the technology products, support and services from Sun Microsystems to help make this all possible."

--Gary Zenkel, President, NBC Olympics

ONEIS Technology

"The fact that we are a new business using enterprise-quality Sun hardware, such as Sun Fire X4150 and Sun Fire X2100 M2 servers, is a massive advantage giving us a great start in driving growth."

--Ben Summers, Technical Director, ONEIS

Oregon State University

"The new Sun Fire X4600 server from Sun Microsystems will transform our College's scientific enterprise by providing high performance computing in a space not much bigger than a bread box."

"The new Sun Fire X4600 server from Sun Microsystems will transform our College's scientific enterprise by providing high performance computing in a space not much bigger than a bread box. Developing the next generation of global ecosystem and climate models requires continuous innovation by adding new knowledge about the physics, biology and chemistry of our Earth system. Today, Sun has put the tools right next to the scientist, enabling rapid prototyping of new models to answer the pressing challenges facing our planet. This will unleash a new wave of creativity, much as the desktop computer did for publishing twenty years ago."

--Mark Abbott, Dean and Professor, College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University

Paramount

"Sun provided us with not only superior technology, but also a safety net. The Sun team helped us develop our tools and make the whole pipeline work. We have far more than a business relationship with Sun; it is a true partnership. There is not another vendor that we can turn to and get this kind of support."

--David Krause, Manager of Technology, Barnyard

"Sun became an extension of our crew, establishing the kind of relationship that is critical for any film's success. Our honeymoon period has lasted and lasted, and the level of support we have received has increased over time. We have experienced the power of a Sun partnership and it has made all the difference to our success."

--Aaron Parry, Executive Producer, Barnyard

Plexus Corporation

In four words: fewer, faster, cooler, cheaper. Thanks to the Sun servers, we were able to deliver a better end-user experience while dramatically reducing our server footprint and administration needs. Ultimately, this allows us to perform much more effectively for our customers.

--David Lafferty, Corporate Director, Technology Services, Plexus Corporation

Practice-IT Ltd

"Buying our Sun Fire X4150 server was about establishing an on-going business relationship and maximizing the performance of our virtualized applications."

--Ricky Doyle, Director and Co-founder, Practice-IT

SISTIC

"Our ticketing operations depend heavily on having a stable ticketing system that is resilient enough to handle large volumes of transactions. Our experience in using Sun products has made us confident in their reliability and stabilitycriteria that are key to improving our service to customers."

--Shawn Quek, Head of IT, SISTIC

Synopsys

With the help of Sun products, our grid performance meets and exceeds our expectations every time.

--Sriram Sitaraman, Senior Manager of Information Technology, Synopsys

Thomson Financial

"Our Options Ticker Application running on the Sun Fire X4600, Solaris 10 and optimized by Sun Studio 11 compilers, outperformed Thomson's metric goal by 10% for supporting 250k messages per second. As the backbone for financial information, it is imperative that we meet customer demands for a reduction in cost of information delivery. Thomson was able to achieve this goal by leveraging Sun products, while processing more transactions per second at a lower TCO."

--Miriam Soza, VP Thomson Financial

Tokyo Institute of Technology

"The Sun Fire X4500 server is proof that careful, clever engineering will result in a solution that has never before been achieved. We consider the Sun Fire X4500 server to be the result of genius-level ingenuity on the part of Sun."

--Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, Head of Research Infrastructure, Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology

"Not only is the performance of the Sun Grid HPC environment extremely impressive today, but the ability of the architecture to scale rapidly is really phenomenal, and will enable us to grow our environment to meet our needs for many years to come?no matter how compute-intensive our projects may be."

--Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, Head of Research Infrastructure, Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology

UCLA - Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI)

Our Sun solution helps researchers work faster. and better. Data analysis that would have taken days now takes hours, making it possible to pose more complex questions, and get answers. Now, even a neurobiologist with little computer training has full access to the lab's vast computing power, thanks to the Sun grid solution.

--Dr. Arthur Toga, Director, Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, UCLA

University of Michigan, College of Engineering

The College of Engineering chose the Sun Ultra 20 workstations because they offer very attractive price-performance value for engineering and scientific computing and can be installed in a dual boot configuration to run Linux and Windows on the same machine.

--Paul Killey, Executive Director of Information Technology, College of Engineering, University of Michigan

University of Notre Dame

The Sun high-performance cluster gives us outstanding server price-performance and an excellent ratio of performance to power consumed.and all in a ready-to-deploy solution that we had up and running within two days of delivery.

--Dr. Dewitt Latimer, Deputy Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer and Center for Research Computing Interim Director, University of Notre Dame

USC

"We have been testing Sun Fire X4500 server for the mass storage needs of USC's large-scale data users. For example, we plan to use Sun Fire X4500 server for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education's repository of 52,000 video testimonies of survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust," said Michael Pearce, USC's deputy CIO.

Requiring 175 terabytes of storage, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute's archive is the largest collection of digital materials in the world dedicated to research and scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

"Sun Fire X4500 server will enable us to provide USC researchers with instant access to all 52,000 testimonies and will speed up general access to the archive at many other universities partnering with USC around the world," added Institute Executive Director Douglas Greenberg.

Ventyx (formerly New Energy Associates)

We found that the Sun equipment ran much cooler, ran much, much faster, and the price/performance frankly astounded us.

--Neal Tisdale, Vice President, Software Development, Ventyx

Wikimedia Foundation

"The Sun solution provides ease of operations and maintenance, scalability, and backup features like replication and snapshotting that simplify our lives in a million ways. Additionally, its low cost, and its open source so we can do any customizations and debugging we might need. We are extremely happy with the performance of the Sun storage and servers. Overall the solution is doing an awesome job."

--Brion Vibber, Chief Technology Officer, Wikimedia Foundation

Wolfram Research

Wolfram Research was also pleased with the support they received from Sun. Sun was extremely responsive, quickly supporting every need we had for equipment, engineering assistance, and marketing in a very prompt manner. The fact that we are already optimized on the newest version of one of the most established OS platforms on the market, speaks well of both Mathematica and Solaris 10. It's really a perfect union.

--Joy Costa, Manager of Partnership Programs at Wolfram Research