SYSTEMS

SUNNYVALE, CA -- Fujitsu Technology Solutions, a member of the worldwide group of Fujitsu companies, today announced that Southwest Airlines, the fifth-largest airline in the U.S., has achieved a 50-percent performance/response time improvement with SolarisTM compatible, SPARC" compliant PRIMEPOWER servers. Southwest Airlines, which flies more than 64 million passengers a year to 58 airports nationwide, needed highly reliable and powerful clustered servers to run its compute-intensive Rapid Rewards frequent-flyer database and its travel Web site-southwest.com. PRIMEPOWER servers delivered that reliability and performance, demonstrating the biggest "bang for the buck," and providing cost savings at a time when investment protection and value optimization is especially critical. The Rapid Rewards database, running on a PRIMEPOWER 600, supports heavy volumes of inquiries and transactions via the Internet, in addition to information feeds to partners, customer service calls, and batch reporting. Southwest Airlines is communicating with its frequent flyers in the Rapid Rewards database via e-mail, rather than by traditional postal mail, in order to get meaningful travel information to its customers as soon as possible and as a cost-savings mechanism. Southwest has another PRIMEPOWER 600 installed as a hot-standby server and a PRIMEPOWER 400 for tape backup. "We needed the most reliable systems possible to run our Rapid Rewards customer database," said Kerry Schwab, manager of Southwest's Operations for Market Automation. "24x7 is more than a goal to us-it's a necessity, and knowing the data center history and heritage of Fujitsu, and its terrific customer service reputation, we were confident we had found the right solution." Southwest's marketing organization made the decision some time ago to standardize on Solaris, rated the most scalable and most stable operating environment by independent reviewers. Schwab values the fact that he has vendor choice when choosing Solaris systems. To Schwab, choice means competition and therefore better technology, better service, and better pricing. When evaluating competitive servers, Schwab was dissatisfied to find that the majority of vendors employed a restrictive approach that provided few slots on a system board so that customers have to choose between propagating a board for I/O or for processing power. Because PRIMEPOWER servers provide up to nearly twice the number of slots on a system board as competitive systems, customers do not have to trade off I/O for processing power. Other PRIMEPOWER benefits important to Southwest Airlines include redundant power supplies and internal drives, adding up to major cost savings. Commented Schwab: "Since we moved to PRIMEPOWER servers, we've seen a substantial performance boost, faster response time, and our backups are quicker." "Southwest Airlines needs rock-solid availability for reliable access to their database at all times," said Richard McCormack, vice president of Product and Solutions Marketing at Fujitsu Technology Solutions, Inc. "PRIMEPOWER systems are a fully mature server line with the power and headroom to handle enormous amounts of data, support complex processing instructions, and adjust to change with ease." Fujitsu Technology Solutions offers PRIMEPOWER servers across the entire spectrum of data center requirements and are the highest-capacity commercial UNIX" servers in the marketplace. PRIMEPOWER servers feature a system bus with crossbar technology, advanced error correction, unique cache design, and more for winning benchmark results. For more information visit www.ftsi/fujitsu.com/primepower/