Sun SPARC Enterprise Servers
Featured Customer TestimonialsOur Sun SPARC Enterprise system customers describe the systems they deployed and the benefits they gained. AbacusA division of Epsilon, Abacus helps companies to better understand their customers with accurate and current data. By maintaining the nation's largest cooperative database of purchase history, Abacus gives companies instant insight into the purchasing habits of 100 million households, 5.5 billion consumer transactions, and 1.5 billion business-to-business transactions. "For us, the green initiative is really about cost savings. To go green, we need to leverage new technology that has the lowest power consumption and the smallest datacenter footprint. Sun servers deliver on that." Doug Tschudy, Vice President Information Technology Operations, Abacus Accor North AmericaHeadquartered in Dallas, Texas, Accor North America employs more than 16,000 people and operates more than 950 upscale and economy hotel properties including Sofitel, Novotel, Studio 6, and Motel 6 in the U.S. and Canada. Accor North America is part of Accor, a worldwide leader in hotels, tourism, and corporate services. "We've had a good experience with the duty-cycle, the history and build quality of Sun storage products. The Sun StorageTek 6140 and 6540 arrays and high performance T10000 tape drives are no exception. In particular, we like the built-in encryption in the tape drives, and the fact that we can use it without reducing performance." Ken Sibley, UNIX and Storage Manager, Accor North America Brown-Forman CorporationBased in Louisville, Kentucky, Brown-Forman Corporation is one of the largest American-owned spirits and wine companies and is among the 10 largest global spirits companies. Brown-Forman brands include Jack Daniel's© Tennessee Whiskey, Korbel© California Champagnes, Southern Comfort© and Finlandia© Vodkas. The company sells its brands in more than 135 countries. "In our opinion, the Solaris Operating System performs in a stellar fashion for 'heavy lift' applications. From a TCO standpoint, it was a bit of a no-brainer for us to choose Solaris Containers. We plan to use virtualization to push consolidation to the limit and decrease the datacenter footprint by 50%." Mitch Zebrun, Lead Engineer, SAP Enterprise Software Administration, Brown-Forman Corporation City of San Antonio"Sun's enterprise-class virtualization technologies have served the City of San Antonio well. They're a critical component of our overall IT transformation and optimization strategy, allowing us to rapidly deploy highly available server capacity of our Sun M-Series servers to meet the City's changing business needs while saving money in the process. Once the SAP application and database workloads were redistributed across the SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 servers, the system-wide average dialog response time immediately improved nearly three-fold. This translates to increased productivity and a higher ROI for the City's SAP solution." Kevin Goodwin, Assistant Director, City of San Antonio Information Technology Services Department Clifford ChanceClifford Chance, one of the largest law firms in the world, has global practices that include banking and finance, capital markets, and litigation. Based in London, Clifford Chance reported revenue of £1.329 billion ($2.29 billion) in fiscal year 2008 ending April 2008 and has offices in 20 countries and about 7,500 employees. "The Solaris OS and Sun enterprise servers support our consolidation strategy in several ways. One of them is that you can deploy smaller footprints that have scalable performance, and then you can virtualize within these small footprints and support a number of applications." Hisham Anis, Enterprise Architect, Clifford Chance Core Services CorporationFounded in 1990 and headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey, Core Services is a leading provider of consulting and outsourcing services for Oracle applications. Core has worked exclusively with Oracle technology for 15 years, hosting and deploying Oracle solutions for more than 65 major corporations around the world. Core is a $20 million company with approximately 90 employees. "As a leading provider of consulting and outsourcing services, Core Services replaced and consolidated its previous Linux-based Dell systems with Sun's SPARC Enterprise servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. We now easily scale up to 64 CPUs and enjoy unparalleled performance by cutting batch job run time up to 67 percent. With Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) and Oracle E-Business Suite on Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, we save in licensing costs, and have reduced our server footprint by 67 percent. Sun's servers provide us with maximum uptime and long term investment protection." said James Bistis, President and CEO of Core Services "By going with the Sun M-Series servers, we are able to meet our SLAs with faster, better, and smaller servers. We were able to increase our capacity and actually reduce our footprint and costs." Bimal Doshi, Vice President of Operations, Core Services
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Gruppo Novellini"Gruppo Novellini, Italian manufacturer of shower enclosures, bathtubs and whirlpool tubs, selected Sun Microsystems' servers and storage to host and back up its SAP R/3 applications in an SAP NetWeaver environment. "Based on recommendations given by IT-Link, an SAP VAR partner and our main ICT partner, we chose Sun's SPARC Enterprise M4000 and Sun Fire X4200 M2 servers along with the Sun Blade 6000 system and Sun StorageTek 6140 array to help us simplify our IT operations. Faster time to market, reduced delivery times and lower costs are critical to stay competitive, and Sun technology delivers the scalability we need to address our current and future business requirements - while optimizing price/performance." Gianfranco Novellini, President, Gruppo Novellini Grupo Villar MirGrupo Villar Mir, headquartered in Madrid, is one of the largest Spanish conglomerates, with an international presence in 16 countries on 4 continents and business relations with 43 other countries. The company's subsidiaries are in the construction, fertilizer and electric power generation businesses. "With the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, we enjoy unparalleled response times, the highest ratios of security, performance and flexibility, and costs that are nearly 50 percent less than former platforms." Carlos Lafitte, Advisor, IT Space (technology subsidiary of Grupo Villar Mir) High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory"Sun's new quad-core SPARC Enterprise M Series servers provide HPCVL with better system utilization, a large memory footprint, and 512 compute threads per system in a multi-threaded shared memory environment, which allows our researchers the scalability they need to examine problems in even finer detail. This provides us a huge competitive advantage in many research areas, such as mathematical genomics, computational fluid dynamics, and drug design." Dr. Ken Edgecombe, Executive Director, High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory "The capabilities of our new Sun SMP and CMT clusters give researchers a real competitive advantage over what I call the Intel-trained way of doing things which is, 'Wait until we give you a faster CPU.' Sun allows us to operate in the throughput world, where you can get a lot of work done very quickly, simply because you're multithreading over a large number of CPU cores." Dr. Ken Edgecombe, Executive Director, High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory
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Kookmin BankKookmin Bank is the largest bank in South Korea. The Citizen's National Bank was established in 1963 and Kookmin Bank was created in 2001 through the merger of the former Kookmin Bank and Housing and Commercial Bank (H&CB). Kookmin Bank boasts assets of more than KRW 171 trillion (US$145 billion), a nationwide branch network of nearly 1,200 offices, over 34,000 employees, and more than 24 million customers, which accounts for half of the country's population. "Sun delivers not only hardware but support and services to implement the MCI and K-Portal projects, which is crucial to our organization." Mr. Park, TaeHoon, Team Head, IT Planning Department, Kookmin Bank LinkedIn is an online network of more than 24 million professionals from more than 150 industries worldwide. The LinkedIn site is dedicated to bringing people and businesses together to power careers and foster professional development. "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 myToys.de"We know that we have the option of using other hardware if we wanted to. However, we are very happy with the current Sun system because everything works so well together, and Sun provides us with a one-stop solution." Olaf Brehmer, Head of System Administration, myToys.de National Cheng Kung UniversityNational Cheng Kung University (NCKU) is one of two top universities in Taiwan, with 20,000 students studying in 60 departments within nine colleges. The Research and Services Headquarters of NCKU was established in 1996, and since then 54 research centers have been created. "The management of the M9000 server is truly dynamic. In addition to satisfying performance and throughput, the M9000 server eases management efforts and reduces demands on human resources." Dr. Shieh, Ce Kuen, Chairman, Computer and Network Center, NCKU Qualcomm"As a leading provider of business-to-business wireless enterprise applications and services, Qualcomm has been a long-time Sun and Oracle customer for running our mission critical ERP applications. We recently upgraded and consolidated our previous enterprise servers to Sun SPARC Enterprise and X64 Blade servers for our Oracle E-Business Suite of applications. This upgrade went very smoothly, we had no downtime, no disruptions in service, and have significantly improved performance," said Annette Beatty, IT Staff Manager, Qualcomm. We've come to rely on Sun and Oracle to help us achieve better cost utilization of our IT resources, through greater performance and reliability from our systems. Sun SPARC Enterprise servers continue to be rock solid and offer us the highest investment protection." Annette Beatty, IT Staff Manager, Qualcomm SIM UniversityEstablished in 2005, SIM University (UniSIM) is the first university in Singapore dedicated to working professionals and adult learners. UniSIM currently has 6,300 students and more than 40 academic programs with about 200 learning modules. Flexibility and interactivity are two key factors for UniSIM, as its learning environment must be available 24x7 for professionals no matter what hours they work. "That is where Sun has been most helpful — to ensure that we get a robust, stable, and scalable architecture right from the beginning." Gary Teo, Senior Manager, Education Technology and Production, SIM University StubHub"Solaris is one of the most stable, secure, and scalable operating systems available. Our Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series servers combined with Solaris OS and Oracle database offers rock-solid reliability and uptime along with unmatched investment protection and scalability. We reduced our response time per database transaction by 98.6%, and a 72x performance boost, and achieved a positive ROI in three months." Bill Dougherty, Director of Site Operations, StubHub SuccessFactorsSuccessFactors, founded in 2001, delivers on-demand performance and talent management solutions that enable organizations to achieve high-performing workforces. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, SuccessFactors has more than 700 employees and serves more than 1,750 organizations worldwide. "I've been very pleased with how Sun works with presales engineers and resellers to understand what their customers are trying to accomplish and goes the extra mile for you. Sun's people don't just read something off of a data sheet. You can tell they live, eat, and breathe the technology and really believe in it." Jeremy Bauer, Vice President of Information Technology, SuccessFactors
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Sun Direct TVSun Direct TV Private is part of the SunTV Network, based in Chennai, India. SunTV Network is India's second-largest television network, with 22 channels. It also has 13 FM radio stations, two daily newspapers, and four magazines in multiple Indian languages. SunTV has posted annual revenues of approximately 4 billion USD. "The performance, scalability, availability, and productivity of the Sun Microsystems solution gives us a foundation that we can use for years to come, and we expect considerable savings on hardware and energy costs." Tony D'Silva, Chief Operating Officer, Sun Direct TV Swisscom IT Services"Swisscom IT Services has successfully beta tested the new Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 system and we are convinced that it delivers outstanding performance and reliability for our mission-critical infrastructure." Men Beglinger, Swisscom IT Services, Swisscom IT Services WegenerWegener is the largest publisher of regional daily newspapers and free door-to-door papers in the Netherlands. Every day some 800,000 copies of Wegener's seven regional dailies are delivered to readers throughout a major portion of the country, reaching an average of 2.6 million readers daily. "Using Sun SPARC Enterprise servers and Solaris Containers, we have consolidated our failover site and virtualized our application – helping make our IT infrastructure more responsive to new developments and simpler to manage." André Schonewille, ICT Operations Manager, Wegener YuntaaYuntaa is a Belgian Web 2.0 platform where users from around the world can store, manage, and share a variety of digital files such as photos, music, and videos. "Yuntaa" is Spanish slang for "alternative," and the company prides itself in being an alternative choice on the Web. The online service combines the best of Web 2.0 applications with the security and benefits of online storage and backup. "We chose Sun servers and storage because we can rely on Sun's reputation to achieve the scalability, reliability, integrity, and innovation that our customers expect from us." Andy Barrett, CTO, Yuntaa RWTH Aachen UniversityThe RWTH (Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule) Aachen, also known as the Aachen University of Technology, is one of Europe's top technical institutions for research and higher learning. Over 29,000 students pursue studies in engineering, chemistry, physics, medicine, and other fields, where applications such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tax the power of the highest performance computers the industry is able to produce. One of the largest supercomputers in the world is housed there, powered by Sun Microsystems technology. The university was curious about how the new Sun Fire T2000 might fit into this kind of environment, and decided to test one in their HPC lab. "The employment of new types of micro-processors with chip multi-processing (CMP) and chip multi-threading (CMT) technologies which will most likely dominate the market of HPC systems in the future. For sure, future multi-threading processors will be capable of executing floating point operations at the same rate as the T1 processors executes integer operations today, which the Sun Fire T2000 did well in our tests. We look to Sun to provide these kinds of advanced technologies to help guide us into the future." Dieter an Mey, HPC Team Lead, RWTH Aachen University Read RWTH Aachen's full testing report China Mobile Communications CorporationChina Mobile Communications Corporation (China Mobile) is the largest mobile phone operator in China, and the world's largest mobile phone operator ranked by number of subscribers. Always looking to improve customer service, they recently tested the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 for their business statistics and reporting system. "We ran extensive testing on the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server running Oracle databases and it's been truly amazing. We were able to double our performance on the 4RU Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server compared to our existing 40RU, 64 CPU system and also cut CPU utilization by over 50%. We have never seen so much mid-range computing power in such a small box while also dramatically reducing space and power consumption." Mr. Wangxin, director of the BOSS operations department, China Mobile High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory"Our staff and a number of researchers have been testing their codes with the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server and have found that most codes scale extremely well on these systems. We have installed 78 of these multithreaded systems to help meet the growing needs of our user base and to help researchers get experience with this new paradigm. Using the capacity provided through this multi-threading model, researchers will get more work done. This is a paradigm shift in how you think of doing your computations. Each thread is not a CPU core, unlike in the past, but a process that shares the same core with up to seven other threads. Although the individual threads may not be as fast as on some single threaded processors, the ability to scale gives the throughput that makes the T5140 server a great investment." Dr. Ken Edgecombe, Executive Director, HPCVL Read about Victoria Falls Cluster HPCL-Mittal Energy Limited (HMEL)HMEL deployed two Sun SPARC T5440 servers and used Solaris Containers to achieve maximum utilization and run each SAP ERP module and its corresponding database on separate virtualized servers. Sun required 20 percent less space than its nearest competitor and annualized power supply costs for the Sun solution were $20,000 to $30,000 less than the nearest competitor. IDEAS International"While the previous generation UltraSPARC T1 was certainly an innovative design, the new UltraSPARC T2 brings the platform a far greater level of maturity which we believe will help the 'Niagara' concept reach its potential as a disruptive technology....the new servers announced today have the potential to claim significant market share amongst web serving, cryptography and smaller database users." International Fund Services (IFS)"We've had 100% reliability from all our Sun CoolThreads servers–no down time associated with any operating system issues or hardware failure–and we've exceeded all of our service-level agreements." Robert Lampietti, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, State Street Alternative Investment Solutions IT.com"Our biggest challenge is how to accelerate the discovery process for our customers. That means ingesting data, parsing it, indexing it in several ways and lastly running an extremely computationally intensive machine learning algorithm. Anyone can scale "search" as such, some for the entire Web, but we are doing much more than ordinary search. What we found is that the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server provided an unbelievable capability we never thought possible from any cluster of general purpose servers and at a price point trivial to what that cluster would cost to build and maintain. It is as if we had a foot race with a 200-pound pack on our back and we still flew past the competition. Our throughput went from 3GB of data per hour on a traditional server environment to approximately 50GB of data per hour on the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server – a massive 17x scaling increase, with no tweaking, code changes, or other optimizations required. In other words, the machine scaled our performance as a function of the number of promised threads, with no "gotchas" The performance delivered by the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server was equivalent to that of other HPC systems designed with dozens of cores – Sun said we'd get 128 threads of performance, and they delivered. We found the computing capacity we need in a single box with a tiny space and power footprint. This is critical for our application and any many others like it in the world of Web 2.0. In short, our experience with Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server has been simply amazing! This server is a without a doubt a cluster-killer, and enables us to provide faster response times for our customers, at lower cost and complexity than either traditional servers or niche HPC products." Jason Bond Pratt, CIO, IT.com, Inc MINET"By using Sun technologies, we've been able to realize a full 25% savings on power, cooling, and space requirements." Phil Garrett, General Manager, MINET NEC Corporation"We've found the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 has the availability and serviceability which a server of this class requires. And this product also has the high extensibility of a maximum of 16 HDDs, which is a testament to Sun's innovative R&D and engineering skills. Moreover, the Floating Point that was limited in the UltraSPARC T1 processor design has greatly been enhanced, and we can expect even more performance now across a broader range of workloads. It is expected that this product will become one of the best solutions for ECO and Server consolidation that NEC promotes, and will heavily contribute to the expansion of our server business in the future." Akihisa Makita, Engineering Manager, NEC Corporation New London Associates (NLA)New London Associates (NLA) is a boutique software and technology consulting firm with extensive experience in IT management at Fortune 100 companies and start-up ventures. Their goal is to enhance the internal reputation of their clients IT organization. They have been employing CMT Technology from Sun Microsystems since 2006, and recently tested the latest entry into this server line, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440. "I couldn't believe the performance improvement we got. At first the results were comparable with the current CMT servers we have, then we realized that our code had some real bottlenecks that the testing helped us discover. Once we made some changes to the the core of the Java language processing engine, the application simply flew to over an 8x performance improvement." Michael Holt, Program Manager, NLA Ontario Cancer Biomarker Network (OCBN)The Ontario Cancer Biomarker Network (OCBN) and the High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL) at Queen's University have established a high performance bioinformatics capability based on HPCVL's compute cluster, consisting of Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers equipped with multi-core UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors and running the Solaris 10 OS. These servers together with Sun's CoolTools suite of HPC resources provide the OCBN with a unique and powerful combination of speed, memory bandwidth and scalability to optimize its compute-intensive, distributed, and multi-threaded cancer bioinformatics applications. OCBN is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the discovery and development of cancer biomarkers - biological molecules such as genes and proteins that serve as indicators for the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of disease - to ultimately deliver personalized therapy that is safer and more effective than current approaches. To grapple with the large, multidimensional datasets from genomic, proteomic, and clinical research studies, specialized bioinformatics algorithms must be applied for signal processing, gene and protein quantification, biological function prediction, and data mining. San Diego Supercomputer Center"We found the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server to be a hugely versatile and reliable platform for our data center. The throughput delivered to our expanding web services and portal applications was impressive. We also successfully tested the T5240 running the Solaris 10 Operating System across our 4gb FC SAN with Solaris ZFS and our 10Gigabit Ethernet HPC infrastructure, allowing us to place the T5240 strategically within the HPC topology to save power and reduce TCO. We ran the server continuously for 4 months, and encountered zero downtime. Our conclusion is that the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server is an effective replacement for more traditional mid-range SMP platforms and opens up new opportunities within HPC constellations." Don Thorp, Production Systems Staff, SDSC "Researchers and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) Community depend on Web and database services to host and exhibit their data. This data is the product of millions of hours of experimental observations or computation time by researchers, scientists, and engineers who translate data into new discoveries and who share their results in community data collections for future research. The San Diego Supercomputer Center is a leader in data management for researchers, providing expertise, infrastructure, and tools. SDSC's Oracle databases consist of 2 separate Chip Multithreading (CMT) servers running Oracle RAC clusters that include 3 nodes each. The systems are managed by the Oracle RAC Clusterware software to provide high availability for over 30 local and national research database applications. The systems are used to manage several Terabytes of data, and consistently provide high performance and reliability." Henry Jaime - Group Manager Manager, Web and Database Services, San Diego Supercomputer Center SearchForce Inc"As a result of going to Sun, we improved our response time and we're sitting at less than ten percent system utilization with five times the business we had nine months ago. We have a scalable server and storage platform that can provide air cover for our sales team, and reports we get from our enterprise customers say that there's nothing faster out there." David Simon, Chairman, SearchForce Spencer's Retail"One benefit for us with Sun Microsystems is its understanding of retail and its ability to architect a solution for this type of business. The second benefit is that Sun has the technology to support a transaction-intensive environment, and it can provide us a solution that can handle large amounts of data so that business runs smoothly." Amit Mukherjee, Group CIO, RPG Group STRATOMore than one million customers in six European countries trust in STRATO, Europe's second largest Web host. The company runs over 3.5 million domains on more than 30,000 servers in two state-of-the-art data centers. Recently they tested the new Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 to see how it would perform in this kind of environment. "As Europe's second largest web host, at peak we get up to 1 billion mail-in deliveries (email traffic) per day. After testing the new quad-socket Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server, we discovered that only one T5440 is sufficient to handle the whole load and can replace 10 of our existing Sun Fire T2000 servers. Also Sun's open-source, no cost virtualization technologies, Logical Domains (LDoms) and Solaris Containers can further help us consolidate even more applications. In addition, we were really impressed with the performance, scalability, and eco-efficiency of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server. In fact, we anticipate we may save up to 30% on power consumption alone." Rene Wienholtz, CIO and management board member, STRATO University Of California, Berkeley"We've been using CMT-based systems since Sun released the first Niagara products back in late 2005. The release of the UltraSPARC T2 processor in 2007 with its greatly enhanced Floating Point capability, enabled us to extend CMT to our most challenging HPC codes. We have since extended that work to the UltraSPARC T2 Plus based Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5440 Servers, taking advantage of their multi-socket architectures to scale performance and throughput. We have seen great results scaling from 64 threads in the UltraSPARC T2 systems to 128 and 256 threads in the UltraSPARC T2 Plus systems for our plasma physics and PDE codes, and from our sparse iterative kernel. In addition, this scaling came at no cost to productivity. In fact, we were able to scale without even recompiling the code. For our applications, CMT technology is by far the most productive solution to achieving high performance." Samuel Webb Williams, PhD candidate, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley US Air ForceThe Capabilities Integration Environment consolidated servers using the Containers feature in the Solaris 10 Operating System. Additionally, using Sun's virtualization technology, CIE was able to reduce rack space to achieve a 13:1 consolidation ratio.
SPARC Enterprise Servers with their specific models T1000, T2000, T5120, T5220, T5140, T5240, T5440, M3000, M4000, M5000, M8000 and M9000 are the result of the Sun and Fujitsu joint co-operation. SPARC Enterprise Servers are sold and marketed from Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu Ltd. and Fujitsu Technology Solutions under the respective company brands but are technically and functionally completely identical in construction and therefore 100% compatible in hardware and firmware.
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