Archive | June 20, 2005

Boosts Performance for Algorithmic Trading Customers to Benefit from Lower Latency and Improved Total Cost of Ownership on Award-Winning Platform

Based on customer demand, Reuters (LSE:RTR, NASDAQ:RTRSY), the global information company, and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW – News) today broadened the availability of Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) to run on Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). The agreement is an effort by the two companies to increase performance and reduce latency in algorithmic trading. Additionally, Reuters has announced that future generations of RMDS will support Sun’s new x64 platform. RMDS on Solaris 10 and x64 (64-bit) platforms will allow customers to better manage market data content in real-time across a trading environment.

Larry Tabb, President of Tabb Group, said: “Algorithmic trading and direct market access are the biggest disruptors in modern-day markets going from virtually 0% to 31% of institutional order flow over the past five years. To manage technology in this environment, firms need a massively reliable, scalable, and real-time platform with virtually zero latency as firms now have to cope with market data speeds of up to 70,000 ticks per second. To capture, analyze, and take advantage of data moving this fast latency becomes more critical as milliseconds really matter.”

Michael Parlapiano, EVP, Information Management Solutions at Reuters, said: “Reuters customers ask for increased choice, lower costs and lower latency. In response, we will offer new and existing RMDS customers the additional benefits available from Solaris 10. This deal exemplifies our commitment to meet customer needs by providing them with outstanding platform choices for our products.”

Stuart Wells, EVP, Strategic Development and Sun Financing, Sun Microsystems, said: “Latency is mission critical in the increasingly competitive landscape, and we are pleased that Sun’s R&D and partnership with Reuters has helped further close the gap. We appreciate that Reuters has extended the choices for its financial customers, and we look forward to future decades of successful deployments on Solaris OS.”

Reuters will set up “proof-of-concept” trials for qualified customers. RMDS on Solaris 10 OS is targeted for general availability by the end of 2005. To promote the new offering, the companies will join forces on global marketing activities. Reuters and Sun have teamed for over 20 years to provide reliable and powerful systems and services to the financial services industry.

About Reuters

Reuters (www.reuters.com), the global information company, provides indispensable information tailored for professionals in the financial services, media and corporate markets. Its trusted information drives decision making across the globe based on a reputation for speed, accuracy and independence. Reuters has 14,500 staff in 91 countries. This includes 2,300 editorial staff in 196 bureaux serving 129 countries, making Reuters the world’s largest international multimedia news agency. In 2004, Reuters Group revenues were GBP 2.9 billion.

Reuters and the sphere logo are the trade-marks of the Reuters group of companies.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

A singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world’s most important markets. Sun’s philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

ActewAGL Powers Datacenter With Sun Fire v440 Servers and Solaris OS; Achieves Performance Gains of Up to 70 Percent

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW), today announced that Canberra, Australia-based utility provider ActewAGL has selected it as its IT infrastructure platform of choice for its core applications. The deal is another significant win for Sun’s HP-Away Migration Program, launched in 2003 and designed to help companies port their applications from HP’s AlphaServer/Tru64 platform to to Sun’s Solaris platform, running on UltraSPARC-based Sun Fire servers.

The migration to Sun has resulted in significant benefits for ActewAGL, including an average 50 percent improvement in performance, lower maintenance costs and ease of infrastructure management. The company also estimates it will save an additional $20,000 in annual maintenance costs by moving to Sun.

“We no longer had any faith in HP’s Tru64 technology and required alternative systems to provide 64-bit computing capability,” said Carsten Larsen, Chief Information Officer for ActewAGL. “Upon looking at what the market had to offer, we chose Sun Fire systems and the Solaris OS because it provided a simple yet robust, cost-effective solution.”

“We had reached the end of the line with our HP AlphaServer platform,” added Debesh Halder, Manager, Unix Systems, ActewAGL. “The technology was four years old and struggling to cope with increased demand. However, we were not keen to move to the HP-Intel developed Itanium architecture, which is a relatively new technology. We were looking for a stable, proven platform and Sun was it.”

Established in October 2000, ActewAGL is Australia’s first multi-utility. It provides electricity, natural gas, water and wastewater services to more than 300,000 residential, business and government customers in the Australian Capital Territory. ActewAGL began offering telephony, high-speed data and video services from a number of providers in February 2004 after reaching an agreement with TransACT Capital Communications.

ActewAGL has installed six Sun Fire V440 servers, two Sun(TM) Rack 900 hardware cabinets and two K Virtual Machines (KVM) switches and migrated its core applications to the Sun Solaris Operating System. The project took about 12 months to complete, which included research, selection, procurement, custom development, testing and implementation. It was finished on time and within budget with help from Sun Microsystems.

Since going live with the Sun platform, ActewAGL has seen system performance improve by up to 70 percent. “A report that used to take 10 minutes to generate can now be completed in five minutes,” said Halder. “Staff can also login to financial applications via the Web, which is faster and more convenient for them. Productivity has improved and they are also much happier.”

Maintenance costs have been reduced. “The infrastructure is reliable, easy to support and the competitive Sun licensing structure has resulted in significant savings for ActewAGL,” said Halder. Security has also been bolstered with Sun’s enhanced safety features and robust architecture.

“We continually hear from customers that they’re reluctant to migrate their critical applications to the pricier, untested Itanium architecture,” said Larry Singer, senior vice president and strategic insights officer, Sun Microsystems. “Sun provides an excellent alternative. Our solutions are proven, include a broad base of ISV applications and importantly, protect customers’ investments in a new software infrastructure. We expect our data center migration programs to see continued momentum in coming quarters.”

For more information regarding Sun’s data center migration programs, please visit: http://www.sun.com/datacenter/migration/

About ActewAGL

ActewAGL was formed in October 2000 when the Australian Gas Light Company (AGL), a major private sector group, and ACTEW Corporation, a government-owned enterprise, entered into Australia’s first utility joint venture. It is Australia’s first multi-utility, offering electricity, natural gas, water and wastewater services. In February 2004 ActewAGL entered into a management agreement with TransACT Capital Communications to offer telephony, high-speed data and video services from a number of providers to residential, business and government customers in the ACT.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

A singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world’s most important markets. Sun’s philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Sun Fire V440, Solaris, Sun Rack 900 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

Sun and Independent Software Vendor Partners Provide Integrated Solution to Meet Customers’ Electronic Document, Records Management and Retention Needs  

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW) today announced the general availability of the Sun StorEdge 5310 Compliance Archiving System. The system, a combination of the Sun StorEdge 5310 NAS Appliance and Sun StorEdge Compliance Archiving Software offers an affordable and price competitive alternative for customers’ requirements for growing and complex records retention. Integrated with Sun’s industry leading(1) Identity Management solutions, to administer and report on access controls, and major ISV applications; the Sun StorEdge Compliance Archiving System provides a fully integrated solution to help facilitate compliance with the myriad of both government and business roles regulations — including HIPAA for healthcare, SEC Rule 17a-4 and Basel 2 for financial services, 21 CFR 11 for life sciences, as well the Sarbanes Oxley Act and its global equivalents.

The Sun StorEdge Compliance Archiving System enforces electronic record-retention policies at the storage level. Write-once read-many (WORM) files are non-rewritable and non-erasable. Robust security features–such as audit logs, user authentication, secure clock and access controls–combine to help safeguard the integrity of vital digital information. The system is fully redundant and, can be configured with clustering to ensure no single point of failure. It supports snapshot copies, remote data mirroring and a choice of either Fibre Channel or SATA disk that scales to 179TB. The system is flexible to allow customers to configure how much of the disk is WORM protected; providing room to grow into compliance as needs expand. For layered storage, customers can opt for WORM tape backup/archive as well. The Sun StorEdge Compliance Archiving System has been evaluated to meet the Securities and Exchange Committee’s 240.17a-4 regulation for electronic storage media.

Bruce Overoye, director of IT, Santa Clara County Tax Collector’s Office, said: “We process over 850,000 payments, of property taxes annually, totaling $3 billion. All these transactions are imaged and each one has retention requirements of five, seven, 12 and 30 years, depending on the type of property tax. It is becoming increasingly critical that we drive security and data protection down to the data storage layer. Because of this we are piloting the Sun StorEdge 5310 Compliance Archiving System with our Vignette Imaging and Document Management system, as a way of protecting the integrity of the content we store and enforcing the retention policies we have in place at the County.”

“We see regulatory compliance and data security as key drivers for NAS growth,” said Pushan Rinnen, principal analyst at Gartner. “Although there are many NAS products in the market today, enterprises have limited file archiving options that are powerful and cost-effective enough for HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley.”

Sun continues to promote customer choice and flexibility by providing interoperability between the Sun StorEdge 5310 Compliance Archiving System and applications for e-mail, document, and corporate records management from some of the industry’s leading Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). To date, over 50 data management and content applications – including imaging, messaging, technical computing, oil and gas exploration, and data protection — have been qualified to securely and reliably store data on the system. In addition, a variety of the industry’s best Enterprise Content Management application providers, including AXS-One, iLumin, Mobius Management Systems and Vignette, have qualified their applications with the system’s compliance features to enforce retention and leverage the system’s write-once, read-many (WORM) capability.

“Sun is making great strides to build and deliver integrated compliance offerings that raise the bar for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), helping customers navigate and overcome the complex maze of regulatory records management and retention requirements set both by the government and their own internal guidelines,” said Mark Canepa, executive vice president of Network Storage at Sun. “Sun’s storage portfolio, industry leading identity management solutions, Solaris(TM) 10 data-management functionality and the support of the ISV community, enable Sun to deliver end-to-end, scalable document and records management systems, that a point-product simply cannot match.”

Sun’s portfolio for enabling customers to store corporate documents and records includes the Compliance and Content Management Solution, the Content Infrastructure System for general data archiving on tiered storage, and the 5310 Compliance Archiving System. Sun focuses on risk management and security as an integral part of its products and services, from the desktop application to the back-end archive. This offers customers the capability of archiving regulated data in a flexible, scalable storage solution, and an alternative, end-to-end systems option to point-product solutions offered by storage-only companies.

The Sun StorEdge 5310 Compliance Archiving System is generally available worldwide through Sun and its iForce Storage Elite partners. Pricing begins at US $73,995 for a 2 TB Fibre Channel configuration, and $81,995 for a 6 TB SATA configuration. Prices include all software costs(2).

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

A singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world’s most important markets. Sun’s philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, Java, Sun StorEdge and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

(1) META Group’s METAspectrum report for Identity Management — User Provisioning: Market Overview; January 5th 2005

(2) U.S. list price. All prices quoted are in U.S. dollars.