Try and Buy Customers

Benton Public Utility District

The Benton Public Utility District (PUD) provides power for more than 42,000 citizens in Benton County, Washington. They realized that their aging infrastrucutre needed an overhaul, but they were not sure which vendor could best solve this problem. Had it not been for Sun's Try and Buy program, they might not have tested the Sun Fire T2000, which now supports their Enterprise Resource Management, Human Capital Management, and Financial Databases.

See also success story.

DigiTar

DigiTar, a global leader in Web 2.0 and advanced messaging services, received a Sun Fire T2000 server as part of the Sun Try and Buy program. After testing the CoolThreads technology with the Solaris 10 OS in their datacenter, the company found better transactional throughput numbers and much lower energy consumption levels than their current Intel x86-based servers and made the decision to move away from their HP servers to Sun's CoolThreads systems.

"The Try and Buy Program, I think, is a great program because it gives you a real chance to try real hardware on real problems with real people and bring it all together into a value that you can't get otherwise."
-Dale Williams, CEO, DigiTar, LLC

See also success story.

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eHarmony

By switching to Sun, eHarmony can derive significantly more processing power out of the same physical space and the same amount of power it had been using. In effect, eHarmony can dramatically reduce its datacenter costs as it grows into the additional computing capacity that the Sun technology is providing. Energy conservation was particularly important to eHarmony because power availability is constrained in its area – an issue that affects enterprises in many regions in the United Sates and worldwide. See the full press release here: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-02/sunflash.20070208.1.xml

FTD.com

FTD.COM is an Internet and telephone marketer of flowers and specialty gifts that provides same-day delivery of floral orders to nearly 100 percent of the U.S. population. FTD.COM participated in Try & Buy with the T2000 which was deployed as its next generation application server in a project intended to improve performance of FTD.COM in terms of pages served and transactions processed. FTD.COM has decided to standardize their internal web traffic and transaction processing on the T2000 due to greatly improved performance.

lokalisten.de

Lokalisten.de is an online social network targeted at the youth market. The platform was launched in May 2005 and quickly attracted hundreds of people; membership has risen to 175,000 as of late 2006. They have deployed Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers running Solaris 10 and optimized for highly parallel Internet applications.

"The idea of trying the product for free for 60 days and then buying it was exactly the kind of solution we had in mind."
— Peter Wehner, Trend Scout, Lokalisten.de

See also success story.

PlanetOut

PlanetOut Inc. is the leading global media and entertainment company exclusively serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

"Sun has hit a home run with the combination of Solaris 10 running on the UltraSPARC T1-based servers. The performance is outstanding, and updated features like Solaris Containers which allow us to create zones are easy to setup yet extremely powerful. Since obtaining our first T1000 with the Try and Buy program, we were able to replace nearly 300 aging servers with 25 Sun Fire T1000's and we have greater capacity than before. The T1000 has no competition at this time, and what Sun has done makes other new servers seem outdated."

See also success story.

South Dakota Library Networks

"By using the Sun Try-and-Buy program we were able to fully test the Sun Fire T2000 before buying it. During the tests of the server we were able to see what it was capable of doing and were never able to break it no matter what type of load we threw at it. With such a small footprint and high performance, we knew this server was exactly what we were looking for to run our web applications."
-Sean Crooks, Senior Programmer/Analyst, South Dakota Library Networks

See also success story.

Sun's Try and Buy 'Open Performance Contest' Winners Tout Cost Savings and Performance of Sun Systems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today highlighted the growing success of its innovative Try and Buy Program and winners of its Open Performance Contest. To date there have been over 3,000 systems trialed. In survey results from program participants, 94% of participants would recommend the program to others.