Q3 FY09 Customer Momentum, New Customers Speak Out

Blue Sky Studios

Blue Sky Studios, a wholly-owned unit of Fox Filmed Entertainment, create world-class 3D animated feature films under challenging schedules. Taking into consideration Sun's innovative, energy-efficient, and space-saving server and networking technologies, Blue Sky Studios chose Sun Blade X6250 servers and Sun Ultra 24 workstations to produce its upcoming film Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. As part of Sun's Constellation System, the Sun Blade 6048 Chassis hosts 48 blade servers in one standard rack-sized space, resulting in 2.5x the CPU performance in each rack.

Bureau of Meteorology and The Australian National University

The Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian National University have selected Sun Microsystems to implement two interoperable High-Performance Grid Computing (HPC) Sun Constellation Systems in a four-year deal worth more than $30 million (AUD). The deal will also produce the first major weather forecasting site in the world to implement an open source software stack.

Located at the Bureau in Melbourne and at ANU in Canberra, the HPC environments will include more than 2,500 Sun Blade server modules based on the next-generation Intel Xeon processor (code named Nehalem). These will underpin the Bureau's operational, research, and development missions, and provide a peak computational facility for the Australian research community.

The full implementation will see more than 1,500 Sun Blade server nodes installed at ANU. This is part of a technology refresh driven by the computational needs of climate change and earth science research, along with rapidly growing demand in other areas of Australian research. More than 1,000 Sun Blade server modules will be implemented at the Bureau to support weather forecasting - including for cyclones and other severe weather and emergency management, such as the tsunami warning system.

Department of Telecommunications of the Governorate of the Vatican City State

The Department of Telecommunications offers IT different services to the Vatican State. Sun Microsystems helped the Department of Telecommunications to better manage the growth of the Internet Services during the years. The Department of Telecommunications chose a solution from Sun including Sun Fire T2000 servers and Sun StorageTek 6140 arrays running the Solaris 10 Operating System, and a package of services to implement its existing Sun IT infrastructure. The solution will offer full 24x7 availability backed by SunSpectrum Support and Sun Professional Services for provisioning, deployment and management. Sun Remote Operations Management will also allow the Department of Telecommunication of the Governorate of the Vatican City State to save an estimated 30% in IT management costs, compared with using dedicated internal resources.

Galileu Project

In order to foster the development of Brazil's oil and gas industry through the proliferation of laboratories and advanced research centers in the country, Petrobras invests in many projects. The Galileu Project was established to implement a computational high-performance computing (HPC) grid spread across several state universities. The initial five participating universities chose to deploy an energy-efficient, HPC infrastructure from Sun including the Sun Blade X6275 based on the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series and Lustre file system. As part of the deal, Sun Professional Services will be leveraged for cluster implementation, air conditioning and maintaining hi-visualization environments. The universities chose to implement the Sun HPC infrastructure because it had the best price/performance ratio over competitive solutions.

Major League Baseball Advanced Media

MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM), the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball, needed to upgrade its Web-tier infrastructure to enable the capture, transcode, and play-out of high-resolution internet video streams. The advanced architecture of Sun's Open Storage technologies enables new levels of performance, allowing MLBAM to replace legacy Sun systems with a new high-performance solution based on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems, StorageTek technologies, as well as Sun Fire and Sun SPARC Enterprise servers. Sun Support Services and Sun Managed Services will provide operational support to MLBAM's production datacenter. By implementing a more scalable Web-tier solution, MLBAM expects to cut operating costs by 40 percent while still providing fans with the high-quality online video they expect.

PEMEX Gas

PEMEX Gas, a subsidiary of PEMEX - one of the world's largest oil & gas producers - that is in charge of process, store, transport and market natural gas, LP gas and basic petrochemical products in Mexico, wanted to increase capacity and performance for its SAP and business applications infrastructure and streamline its backup-and-restore capabilities. To address both needs, the company chose to work with Sun for a master, four year agreement to provide five separate services, including an IT-infrastructure-as-a-service contract. The new solution includes Sun Servers using Solaris 10 and Storage technologies as well as Sun Professional and Support Services. PEMEX Gas expects to improve efficiency, increasing overall performance with the use of new Sun Server technology with similar operational costs, as well as increasing backup/restore capacity and performance by more than 50% using the Sun StorageTek VTL technology.

United States Department of Health and Human Services/Office of the National Coordinator

Open source software from Sun is enabling the United States Department of Health and Human Services/Office of the National Coordinator to build a secure, open technology platform to connect federal government agencies and health information exchanges in a "network of networks"--the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN)--built over the Internet. The goal of NHIN is to support the secure exchange of interoperable health information within the federal government and with the tribal, state, local and private sectors to enable increased efficiency, better patient care and improved population health.

As a key member of the NHIN consortium, the federal government needed to build a comprehensive gateway to connect its 26 NHIN member agencies to the NHIN infrastructure, hence the name CONNECT. The HHS has a commitment to using open source technologies to ensure the CONNECT gateway can cost-effectively support the wide variety of operating systems used by the different agencies and Sun's open source technology was selected as the backbone of the CONNECT gateway software. Sun's open source platforms used by NHIN-CONNECT include the Sun GlassFish open source application platform, the Java Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS) based on the open source OpenESB SOA platform, and the Sun Identity Management Suite which includes the open source OpenSSO technology.

University of Zurich

The University of Zurich, Switzerland's largest university, wanted a high-performance computing (HPC) system that could give its researchers the possibility to be at the international forefront in areas such as nanomaterials, drug design, cosmology and particle physics. The university selected an HPC solution from Sun comprised of 576 Sun Blade servers and supported by Sun Grid Engine software and the Sun xVM Ops Center integrated management platform. As a result of the solution's 50-teraflop performance, fast InfiniBand network, and low power consumption, the new supercomputer will offer overall performance that is 10 times higher than that of the university's three existing supercomputers as well as reduced total cost of ownership. The supercomputer will be among the tools used to interpret the findings of the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN.

Vodafone Turkey

Vodafone Turkey, a subsidiary of the world's leading mobile telecommunications company, is consolidating its services infrastructure by deploying Sun SPARC Enterprise and Sun Fire servers along with Sun StorageTek technologies running the Solaris 10 Operating System. With the new Sun server and storage solution, Vodafone Turkey expects to increase system reliability, boost application performance, and realize significant savings in power consumption.