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MENLO PARK, Calif., Helping to reduce complexity and costs in the data center, Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced the opening of two Enterprise Technology Center (ETC) Labs in Menlo Park, Calif., and Hillsboro, Ore., which complement its existing ETC Lab in Burlington, Mass. Packing more compute power than several Fortune 1000 companies in one room and providing access to more than 20,000 square feet of testing ground equipped with network computing power totaling 3,615 CPUs and 205 TB of storage to date, the ETC Labs serve as a "proving ground" for development iForce(SM) partners to ensure quality of their software through performance benchmarks and fine-tuning of their leading edge solutions before commercial launch. "We consider Sun's ETC Labs to be our 'Indy Race Track' proving ground. If our products, combined with our iForce partners' solutions, can be proven to fulfill customer needs here, they have far greater assurance of being a 'go' more quickly in the real world -- and that's assurance no customer can pass up in today's marketplace," said Clark Masters, executive vice president, Enterprise Systems Products at Sun Microsystems, Inc. "We will continue to simplify network computing with development capabilities offered by the ETC Labs to help decrease the risks and costs incurred by our iForce partners when testing and deploying solutions. As a result we are able to provide mutual customers with tested and proven availability, reliability and scalability offered with our binary-compatible Sun Fire(TM) server line of products and solutions." ETC Labs Ensure Sun and iForce Partner Products are Tested and Bullet-Proofed Sun ETC Labs serve as a large-scale test bed for Sun's entire Sun Fire family of enterprise and volume servers, Sun StorEdge(TM) Array products, Sun Open Net Environment (Sun(TM) ONE) software stack and Sun Services. The ETC Labs also provide an effective means for addressing some of the biggest and most vexing enterprise data center problems customers and development iForce partners, such as Oracle, encounter in their large-scale deployments, allowing them to work together to solve issues unique to a particular industry such as massive scalability, data center consolidation and shared resource utilization including: -- QuadraMed: a healthcare software provider, who was able to achieve a very high user count test -- thousands of simulated users and near linear scalability, running a benchmark using QuadraMed's Affinity solution and Sun Fire 6800 Midframe servers. The ETC Lab provided the hardware and resources necessary to stage a large configuration to successfully complete the benchmark test. -- Sanchez Computer Associates Inc.: a financial services software provider, who conducted numerous sizing, benchmarks and tuning projects in the ETC Lab on both Sun Fire 4800 and 6800 Midframe servers. After tuning and benchmarking with Sun engineers in the ETC Lab, performance of the Sanchez core bank processing application, Sanchez Profile, was boosted to a record 1,900 online transactions per second. -- XACCT: a telecommunications software provider, that demonstrated real-world business logic at a capacity capable of handling over 150 million telecom subscribers on a single Sun Enterprise(TM) 10000 server. Near-linear vertical scalability was verified, enabling performance commitments for telecommunications organizations. Sun Writes the Book on Data Center Planning, Design and Development As a byproduct of the work conducted in the ETC Labs, Sun engineers have developed a portfolio of best practices and methodologies for designing a data center, from inception through construction. Sun Microsystems Press and Prentice Hall have published a book authored by Rob Snevely, enterprise architect, Enterprise Systems Products, at Sun Microsystems, Inc., entitled Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology. The book offers customers a set of best practices that they can apply to their own data center methodologies -- including information on capacity sizing, site selection, data center environmental parameters, etc. -- and is available now on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com/books, http://www.amazon.com/ and through other bookstores.