Sun Microsystems, today highlighted more than 30 of the hundreds of customers worldwide who chose Sun to reduce costs and simplify their network computing environments. From financial services companies such as CLSA Asia-Pacific, to major airline carriers such as Air Canada, to leading academic institutions including The George Washington University, organizations throughout the world and across numerous industries are benefiting from Sun's open, secure and affordable systems. "Our network computing vision and strategy are resonating well with our customers," said Anil Gadre, chief marketing officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Sun is expanding its global footprint and working with new and existing customers around the world to remove costs from their business and help them better leverage IT to deliver value to their own customers. We're monetizing those opportunities as we execute against our plan to achieve financial goals for FY05." "The George Washington University is building much of its next-generation computing environment on Sun software and hardware technologies, with Sun consultants playing a key role in putting together all of the pieces," said David Swartz, chief information officer, The George Washington University. "Our selection of Sun was on the basis of its long-term technology strategy, allowing us to deliver leading-edge solutions to faculty, students and administrators." "Hitachi Data Systems ultimately selected Sun on the basis of two criteria," said Sean Godfrey, IT director, Hitachi Data Systems. "First of all, Sun's identity management solution enables true single sign-on access. Second, the provisioning capabilities within Sun Java(TM) System Identity Server software provide leading-edge functionality that exceeds any other solution offering in the market place today." Some of the many customers purchasing new Sun systems for their price performance, security and interoperability in the fourth quarter include: City of Oakland, Calif. The City of Oakland recently turned to Sun for an enterprise-scale server refresh and storage upgrade to automate more of its business processes. During this engagement, Sun Services helped to migrate critical business data and applications -- including Oracle E-Business Suite 11i on Oracle8i database -- from the original Sun Enterprise 10000 server to a Sun Fire 15K server running the Solaris 9 OS. Sun consultants also helped install two Sun Fire V1280 servers for test and development, and replace direct-attached storage systems with a SAN based on Sun StorEdge technology, in order to accommodate storage volumes that have grown to 15 terabytes. By increasing its computing capacity, the City of Oakland anticipates migrating applications from expensive legacy servers, providing the compute resources required for new applications while continuing to experience high levels of performance and system availability as it processes payroll, manages its finances and carries out human resources activities. CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets One of Asia's top equities brokers, CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, worked with Sun Microsystems Finance(sm) (SMF) to establish a long-term, highly scalable and cost-effective program to migrate from its existing HP servers to new Sun Fire 15K servers. Sun proposed a total solution approach with Sun Fire 15k servers, software, services and an attractive lease proposition with technology refreshment options developed by SMF. This resulted in a unified UNIX(r) environment running on the Solaris OS. College of William & Mary The College of William & Mary, founded in 1693, is the second oldest public university in the nation. Students from seven science departments work directly with the school's SciClone cluster, a Solaris-based environment including Sun Fire servers and Sun StorEdge sofater. This environment was created to facilitate interactive research and education between the university's departments and schools that share an interest in using computing to advance research and education. Between 300 and 400 users utilize 207 server nodes and 14 terabytes of storage running the Solaris 9 OS and Sun StorEdge QFS software to do large-scale computations in a wide variety of disciplines. Jefferson County, Birmingham, Ala. Jefferson County in Birmingham, Alabama purchased its (12 domain) Sun Fire 15K Capacity on Demand (COD) system as a server consolidation solution. The Department of Information Technology in Jefferson County upgraded its earlier Sun Fire 4800 server and Sun Enterprise(TM) 6500 and 3500 servers to help lower total cost of ownership and reduce overall footprint in its data center. Jefferson County desired a single point of contact for service and support, and wanted to continue receiving outstanding quality of Sun Services and reliability of Sun equipment. Jefferson County is now building an IT infrastructure based more on Sun technology, thus growing its relationship with Sun as its trusted IT advisor. Sun provided its COD capabilities for future growth, as it is needed. Implementing Sun's COD strategy, which accommodates Jefferson County's three-year budget, headroom and capacity planning, allows for easier procurement and reduction in hardware upgrade cycles. Jefferson County takes advantage of a full suite of services from Sun Services (including Sun High Availability packs and implementation services), and has also purchased Sun StorEdge L700 tape library, Brocade switches, and Veritas software. Jefferson County is running Oracle9i database, GIS, revenue reporting, tax collection, licensing, financials (A/R, A/P) applications on Sun. Klinikum Nurnberg Sun implemented a highly available, secure and scalable IT-infrastructure for the hospital-wide use of SAP's enterprise resource planning application based on two Sun Fire V480 servers, two Sun Fire V880 servers and the Sun StorEdge 9980 high-end data center storage system. National Research Council The National Research Council of the Canadian Bioinformatics Resource is a distributed network of collaborating institutes, universities and individuals across Canada dedicated to the provision of bioinformatics services to Canadian researchers. The NRC's Canadian Bioinformatics Rescue (CBR) is an early adopter of the Sun Fire E20K enterprise system. Replacing two older enterprise class systems, NRC-CBR chose the Sun Fire E20K server for its tremendous scalability and throughput computing potential. This Sun solution is a high-performance, high-end data center that supports the NRC-CBR with its chip multithreading technology. With new fault management technology, the Bioinformatics Grid offers extended service uptime and enhanced system manageability, all with a reduced cost of ownership. NRC-CBR installed Sun GridEngine Enterprise Edition test grid across Canada at select member sites. Ottawa Health Research Institute Sun's leading role in Canadian bioinformatics, health and life sciences research continues with the implementation of a bioinformatics cluster at the Ottawa Health Research Institute (OHRI). OHRI is the research arm of the Ottawa Hospital, and a major part of the University of Ottawa Faculties of Medicine and Health Science. Through the OHRI's Bioinformatics Team, more than 300 scientists and investigators, 300 students, and 500 support staff will have access to a full range of Sun Fire, UltraSPARC(r) and StorEdge technology. Sun's technology will help facilitate future successes for one of the fastest growing and most respected hospital-based research institutes in Canada. Siemens Siemens and Sun have built a long-term and global partner relationship. The UltraSPARC IV processor is Sun's first generation of chip multithreading (CMT) processors that is targeted for midrange and high-end server lines. These processors provide up to twice the application throughput of the current UltraSPARC III processor. The dual-thread UltraSPARC IV processor was developed in concert with the Solaris Operating System to meet the challenging requirements of mission-critical enterprises, high performance technical computing (HPTC) environments and compute-intensive applications. Siemens selected Sun's UltraSPARC IV (Sun Fire E6900 & Sun Fire E2900 servers) for two reasons: The higher level of flexibility when implementing R&D on mobile handsets, and the simplified administration and provisioning of the system. Tata Teleservices Incorporated in 1996, Tata Teleservices was the first to launch mobile services in India. Tata Teleservices has a strong workforce of 5,500 and the company serves 1.6 million customers in over 50 towns. Tata uses Sun Fire 15K servers to support telecom billing, order processing, CRM and ERP solutions. Tsann Kuen Group Tsann Kuen Group, the leader of small home appliances and 3C retail chain store businesses in Taiwan and China, migrated its existing HP servers to new Sun servers and successfully built up a highly available and scalable platform with complete ERP system solutions. Tsann Kuen chose Sun Fire 12K and StorEdge 9970 system products to help ensure a more stable and secure infrastructure. T-Systems GCF-OSY T-Systems GCF-OSY (Deutsche Telekom) continues to utilize Sun Preventive Services to manage its hosted data center environments. The proactive services approach of Sun Preventive Services is helping T-Systems GCF-OSY improve customer satisfaction by increasing system availability while reducing the number of Priority One service calls. Services delivery includes Sun Net Connect services for system telemetry, Sun RAS (Reliability, availability, serviceability) Profiles service for proactively addressing potential quality-of-service issues and Traffic Light Patchmanagement (TLP) and Configuration and Service Tracker (CST) for tracking system configuration details and patch management. TV4 TV4 wanted to archive all of their broadcasting material, both online with TV4 and on two disaster/recovery sites on tape. Sun provided a three year Sun Managed Service contract to achieve this goal. University of Calgary The University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine Sun Center of Excellence for Visual Genomics has upgraded its Sun Fire 6800 server to a Sun Fire 6900 server. This increases the storage and graphics capabilities for the Java 3D API-enabled CAVE. With four additional terabytes of storage and the addition of a 24 CPU SPARC cluster, the Center of Excellence continues to develop and remain a leader in bioinformatics research. As well, with the addition of 75 Sun Ray thin clients for the undergraduate students, the Canadian Bioinformatics Resource in Alberta is able to expand its network of universities and government research laboratories across Canada.