Business Intelligence & Data Warehouse Solutions

In today's highly competitive business climate, making better decisions faster can mean the difference between surviving and thriving. The challenges are managing the exponential growth of data in a cost-effective and secure manner, while transforming relevant data into information for decision support needs.

Sun takes the cost and complexity out of today's business intelligence and data warehouse requirements with a single open platform whose architecture can scale to meet your entire needs - from deployment today to meeting your growth needs tomorrow. The results are faster access to information, the ability to make better decisions quickly and speed up time to market.

Business Intelligence - Not Just Raw Data, Strategic Information
By extracting data from a wide variety of sources and analyzing it, decision makers can take action based on meaningful information. The technological capability and speed coupled with quality of decision-making is the edge companies seek.

Business Intelligence (BI) applications rely on Data Warehouses (DW) - database repositories designed to support a company's decision-making process. Data warehouses are complex and challenging to implement. The volume of data in today's typical data warehouse is enormous and continues to grow at a dramatic rate - studies indicate that data doubles every 12 to 24 months - requiring higher performance hardware and software that can integrate easily with existing systems, and can support the increased demands brought about by increased data. Additional data compliance through the recent Sarbanes-Oxley and BASIL II legislation is creating enormous implications in how data is managed for all companies.

Partnering with Sun: Your Trusted Advisor
With some of the largest data warehouses running on Sun technology, a portfolio of best-of-breed Sun Partners in Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse solutions, and a reputation for providing business- critical reliability for over 20 years, you can bet your business on Sun. Whether you are adapting your current environment to enhance your scalability or implementing a new solution, we can help you at any phase. And you can count on architecture design services that will maximize the technical reliability, availability, and scalability for which we are known.

It all starts with Sun's open systems philosophy which we believe protects your capital investment and ensures a clear path to implementing future technologies and client interfaces.

Sun provides the technology capabilities for improved Data Quality, Security, Availability, Performance/Scalability, and reduced Cost/Complexity so that you can manage your business effectively.

Sun Technology: Think Big, Start Small, Scale Up - Be Secure
Based on Sun's UltraSPARC architecture and 64-bit Solaris Operating System, Sun Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse solutions deliver the industry's most flexible architecture. Sun's highly scalable Sun Fire servers (from midrange to high end) provide the industry's broadest compatible server product family and are designed to support huge data warehouses and thousands of users. Sun Fire technology is based on UNIX and provides mainframe-like partitions and true system-wide scalability - at a significantly lower cost than the traditional mainframe environment. All Sun servers run the proven, robust Solaris Operating System and give companies the ability to add more users and more data while sustaining high system and query performance thus lowering total cost of ownership (TCO).

Sun's comprehensive family of StorEdge Systems, designed using the latest virtualization and functional blade architecture, provide reliable, high I/O bandwidth and throughput. With world-class storage technology in place, you can turn to Sun for a suite of software capabilities including the ability to minimize disruptions to your critical business applications and data through point-in-time copy and remote mirroring (Sun StorEdge Availability Suite Software). In addition, Sun's StorEdge SAM-FS software addresses the challenges of costly management of data by providing you with policy-based file services and continuous archiving of file data to appropriate storage resources - all based on the data lifecycle and inherent value to your business.

By introducing the Java Enterprise System, Sun takes open, scalable computing to an industry-changing level. This dramatic new subscription-based model to enterprise infrastructure software changes the entire process of acquiring, deploying, and operating software.

What really sets Sun apart from other platform vendors is our vision of secure network computing and industry-leading Web services technology. Security is built-in not bolted-on. Sun takes security to new heights by designing into the architecture multiple layers of highgrade security, a military - grade secure operating system, hardwarebased separation in domains, and a secure communications channel for network-based administration of system controllers.

Best-of-Breed Alliances and Practices
Sun understands that successfully implementing Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse solutions can be a complex operation and has teamed with its Sun Partners to provide companies with secure, scalable solutions. Leading Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse software companies' products run on Sun's UNIX platform, and Sun collaborates with these top independent software vendors (ISVs), global systems integrators, and leading system and service providers in these key areas:

• Query & Reporting
• On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP)
• Data Management
• Extract, Transform & Load (ETL)

Sun Services - From Concept and Design to Total Managed Services
Sun Professional Services offer a comprehensive portfolio of services to facilitate the end-to-end implementation of Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse solutions. Sun's extensive experience means customers can count on our planning, configuration, and architectural services to help integrate hardware, software, and design options for an effective deployment. Sun Services offers Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse workshops focused on identifying best practices and Architectural Design sessions addressing each customer's complete needs.

Sun's Reference Architectures and Sun Competency Centers for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing (BIDW) lower the risk and cost of implementing a BIDW solution by helping you evaluate solutions that map to your requirements. You can try out a new concept, build a customized reference architecture (based on your own data), test its performance and scalability, and see working prototypes on Sun equipment - all at no charge.

Sun's approach gives you access to:

• BIDW Reference Architectures
• BIDW Architecture Implementation Methodology

• Everything necessary to make an intelligent BIDW decision: best practices, briefings, assessments, solution demonstrations, proof-of-concepts, custom reference architectures, performance tuning, and benchmark testing.
• Combined expertise of Sun BIDW specialists, third-party vendors, and systems integrators
• Complete array of hardware and software products