Archive | December 7, 2004

Industry Leaders Continue Collaboration to Help Commercial Enterprises Use the Power of Grid Computing

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) and Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL) continue their joint collaboration around a set of integrated Grid computing solutions designed to help commercial enterprises harness the power of Grid computing and to achieve better utilization of existing IT assets.

With the Grid computing market estimated to reach as much as $12 billion by the year 2007(1), Sun and Oracle are committed to providing customers with next generation data center solutions on both 32- and 64-bit platforms, backed by the power and innovation of Sun’s Solaris Operating System (OS). Today, information technology executives are more frequently considering Grid computing solutions for commercial enterprise computing applications including stock transactions, payroll management, sales orders, deliveries and inventory control. In fact, nearly two-thirds of companies surveyed earlier this year indicated that they were already using–or were interested in using–Grid technology(2) for these repetitious and storage intensive operations.

To help lower the barrier of entry to Grid computing, the two companies created a Grid Reference Architecture for Oracle(R) 10g software, providing customers with a set of tested and tuned guidelines for implementing a Grid computing solution. This documented proof-of-concept deployment architecture can decrease the complexity of decision-making and deployment, while increasing reliability and lowering risk for potential customers. The Grid Reference Architecture was created jointly by Sun and Oracle engineers and has been proven to reduce total-cost-of-ownership, while saving implementation time.

“Many of today’s data centers can be described as cost-ineffective, due to low utilization of resources,” said Bjorn Andersson, director of Grid marketing at Sun Microsystems, Inc. “Together with Oracle, we continue to provide customers proven building blocks for Grid based on Sun Fire systems, the Solaris OS, Sun StorEdge, software and services, which can easily be configured to transform poor-performing data centers into a competitive weapon.”

To keep costs low and continue to provide advanced technologies, Sun recently announced Sun Cluster and Oracle RAC support on shared file systems, as well as a new Sun Cluster Oracle RAC SVM Edition that enables powerful volume management of Oracle RAC deployments. This comprehensive Sun and Oracle solution helps ensure that customer deployments receive the highest levels of reliability, availability and support.

“We are committed to providing customers with choice and flexibility when it comes to Grid computing,” said Prem Kumar, vice president, Server Technologies, Oracle Corporation. “Our work with Sun around Oracle Database 10g continues to focus on delivering solutions that maximize asset utilization and decrease overall IT costs—a value proposition that resonates with organizations of all sizes, in all industries.”

Oracle and Sun have worked together for 20 years to deliver secure, reliable and scalable enterprise-class data centers to more than 70,000 customers around the world. The two companies are board members of the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA), a consortium of leading vendors and user companies focused on developing enterprise Grid solutions and accelerating the deployment of Grid computing in the enterprise. With a shared commitment to open, standards-based computing, Oracle and Sun deliver optimal performance, innovation and value to the customer through joint engineering efforts, sales and service. More information about today’s announcements and the Oracle Sun alliance is available at www.sun.com/oracle or www.oracle.com/sun.

More details on the Grid Reference Architecture are available at www.sun.com/oracle/grid

About Sun at Oracle OpenWorld

Join Sun Microsystems at Oracle OpenWorld (Booth #1702) to hear how customers are benefiting from Grid computing solutions provided by Sun and Oracle. Visit Sun’s online press kit at (http://sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/oow2004/) to view all press releases, presentation schedules and product background.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, Java, Sun StorEdge, Sun Fire, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Oracle Corporation is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

(1) IDC: “The Role of Grid Computing in the Coming Innovation Wave,” J. Humphreys, M. Melenovsky, March 2004 (2) Forrester: “Grid Gets Big, But the Term is Confusing,” F. Gillett, May 2004

Sun Microsystems today announced a relationship with a key technology partner in its strategy to develop next generation ATCA (Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture) blade server products based on the latest industry specifications from PICMG. Sun is collaborating with Pigeon Point Systems, an industry leading supplier of management sub-systems for PICMG standard blade technology, to create low cost, high performance ATCA blade server products to address next generation high throughput telecom services.

With this relationship, Sun is accelerating its development of the next generation Netra ATCA blade server product family, targeted for 2005 availability. Announced at ITU Telecom Asia in Sept, 2004, Sun plans to provide a complete ATCA blade server solution, supporting both UltraSPARC(R) and Opteron(R) blades as well as Solaris and CG Linux in the same system.

The ATCA specifications provide a high performance, high bandwidth telecom blade architecture, designed to meet the needs of next generation high-throughput telecom service applications, such as 3G wireless networks, unified media servers and voice over IP (VoIP) solutions.

“The ATCA standard is beginning to show significant momentum in the market, and Sun is taking an aggressive approach in developing and deploying a complete and advanced ATCA solution,” said Raju Penumatcha, VP Netra Systems and Networking (NSN), Sun Microsystems. “By partnering with industry leading technology partners like Pigeon Point Systems, Sun plans to deliver a low cost, highly reliable ATCA blade server offering that will meet the most stringent requirements of our network equipment provider customers.”

Sun’s current blade system management architecture, used in Sun’s Netra cPCI and cPSB blade servers , has saved customers significant time and money in deploying and maintaining highly reliable and manageable telecom blade products. The new ATCA platform will leverage the same blade system management architecture and software while providing a higher level of reliability and manageability for network equipment provider customers.

“NTT Comware has abundant experience and proven results in using telecom server products, including Sun’s Netra CT cPCI server, for many years,” stated a NTTComware Executive, a major Japanese network service provider. “We are excited about Sun’s new ATCA blade server products and plan to evaluate the products for developing our next generation network system platform.”

Pigeon Point Systems delivers fully customizable, off-the-shelf hardware and software components for industry leading blade system management.

Pigeon Point Systems will supply its IPM Sentry Board Management Reference (BMR) designs for incorporation into Sun’s ATCA blades and its IPM Sentry Shelf Management Mezzanine (ShMM) module as the core for the shelf level management of Sun’s systems. Both subsystems deliver demonstrated ATCA compliance and interoperability and will serve as an effective foundation for Sun’s highly reliable standards-based shelf and blade management technologies. Sun will port its standards-based blade management software, Managed Object Hierarchy (MOH), to Pigeon Point Systems’ IPM Sentry ShMM, creating a redundant, highly reliable ATCA system management architecture which reduces OAM development costs and time to market.

“Pigeon Point Systems’ IPM Sentry subsystems are created and backed by widely recognized experts and leaders in PICMG’s management standards. These subsystems are also designed to meet the high expectations of network equipment providers in other areas, such as reliability and field upgradeability,” said Mark Overgaard, President, Pigeon Point Systems. “We are delighted to be collaborating closely with Sun to bring the latest standards-based management subsystems technologies to Sun’s ATCA blade server products to meet the most demanding customer requirements.”

About Pigeon Point Systems

Pigeon Point Systems (PPS) provides products and services that enable cost-effective management of standards-based platformsùincluding AdvancedTCA, AdvancedMC (AMC), CompactTCA and CompactPCIùand is a leader in the definition of those platforms. With its IPM Sentry shelf management products, PPS offers the first shelf management building blocks that compatibly support AdvancedTCA and CompactPCI, with similar support for CompactTCA to come. The IPM Sentry board management productsùalso the first off-the-shelf offerings in the industryùenable compact, cost-effective management subsystems for boards and other FRUs, including AMC carriers and AMCs. PPS is a leader in the AdvancedTCA, AdvancedMC and CompactTCA subcommittees and is active in many other technical subcommittees of PICMG. For more information about PPS, visit their web site at www.pigeonpoint.com or call their headquarters at 831-438-1565.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Netra, and Solaris are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. Opteron is a trademark or registered trademark of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

Solaris 10 OS and the Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Database 10g demonstrate extreme scalability using the Oracle Applications Standard Batch benchmark

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) announced today that the combination of the Oracle(R) E-Business Suite 11i9, Oracle Database 10g running on Sun Fire E4900 systems with the Solaris 10 OS and Sun StorEdge 6100 series storage arrays achieved a record throughput of 1.27 Million order lines per hour using the Oracle Applications Standard Batch benchmark. The batch benchmark includes the High Volume Order Import (HVOP) program, which is one of the batch components of the Oracle eBusiness Suite Order Management module. The HVOP benchmark focuses exclusively on meeting the high order volumes originating from the electronic channels, such as consumer and business web sites, B2B exchanges, and EDI/XML.

HVOP represents one of the core components of the order-to-cash business flow. HVOP validates the interface data and creates orders in the Oracle E-Business Suite. HVOP then books these orders and advances them to the shipping state. The benchmark performed the standard data validation and security checks. The order lines were priced using the Oracle Advanced Pricing feature and then booked. The order line flow automatically scheduled the lines from the warehouse and advanced the orders to the ship line activity. This benchmark result demonstrates the high performance and scalability of the Oracle E-Business Suite on the Sun platform. This benchmark demonstrates that HVOP can scale to the needs of customers; especially for those customers requiring high order volume throughput.

This benchmark result sets an industry pace for the newest component of the Oracle Applications Standard Benchmark (OASB) kit, the High Volume Order Processing (HVOP). These scalability tests conducted by Sun and Oracle provide customers with the opportunity to observe the performance characteristics of the Oracle eBusiness Suite on 10g and Sun’s first generation of Throughput Computing, UltraSPARC(R) IV processor-based systems under real-world conditions in order to provide sizing and capacity planning information.

Key Findings

The Oracle OASB HVOP benchmark test was performed on a Sun Fire E4900 server with 12 UltraSPARC-IV processors at 1.2GHz running the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i9 (11.5.9), Oracle Database 10g, the Solaris 10 OS, and two Sun StorEdge 6100 series storage arrays. It also demonstrates that the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Database 10g on the latest Sun Systems and Solaris platform can scale to the needs of customers. For additional information, please go to http://www.oracle.com/apps_benchmark/index.html

The benchmark was generated in the Enterprise Technology Center located in Menlo Park, CA, to emulate typical server performance for high order volume throughput.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, Sun StorEdge, Sun Fire, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.