Sun's Starfire(TM) Gains Industry Wide
Momentum With More Than 100 Units Shipped to Retailers Worldwide
Leading Retailers Turn to Sun's Starfire Server to Handle a Variety of Tasks Such as SeasonalTraffic Volumes and Unpredictable Business Demands
NEW YORK, Feb. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Sun Microsystems, Inc., (Nasdaq: SUNW - news) today announced a growing momentum behind Sun's Enterprise(TM) 10000 server in the retail sector. Since its introduction, the server (popularlyknown as the Starfire) has shipped well over 100 Starfires to leading retailers, both traditional and online.
The Starfire server, a mainframe-class server whose price starts around $1 million, performs in mission-critical environments
that demand a wide range of functions to enable ''best of breed'' performance while ensuring the competitive advantages of reliability, availability and scalability.
The Starfire owes its success to high-performance, mainframe-like features and its functionality and ability to meet the rising demands of today's most compute-intensive applications while operating the robust Solaris(TM) Operating Environment.
''Business agility and flexibly are critical factors for retailers competing in the new millennium,'' said Bob DeLaney, group manager worldwide market development for Sun Microsystems. ''Traditionally, retailers have relied upon mainframes to run mission-critical enterprise functions.
Sun's mainframe class Starfire systems easily meet these traditional enterprise, needs and at the same time deliver the unparalleled network computing capabilities that retailers need to web-enable their systems to compete in the dot.com age.''
Retail powerhouses such as OfficeMax and Sears, multi-channel retailers such as Eddie Bauer, as well as online retailers
such as CDNOW and Spiegel have chosen the Starfire system to run mission-critical applications ranging from electronic
commerce to warehousing, merchandise management and enterprise resource planning. The growing list of US retailers
relying on the high-availability and mainframe class performance of the Starfire servers covers a range of retail segments
such as department stores, specialty retailers, grocery stores, drug store chains and specialty office supplies.
''It is clear that Sun's momentum in retail data centers around the world is increasing at a rapid pace,'' said Joyce Becknell,
director of the Platforms group with the Aberdeen group. ''Aggressive retailers are implementing these large scale servers
to run their most intensive mission-critical applications in the reliable Solaris environment.''
About the Starfire
The mainframe-class Sun Enterprise 10000, or Starfire, server provides up to 64 processors and 16 Dynamic System Domains; Sun is the only UNIX (R) platform vendor to offer these features. The Starfire server enables customers to run the most demanding, multi-terabyte applications for data warehousing, decision support, online transaction processing and data analytics on a single, scalable server.
The system hosts more than 12,700 applications for the Solaris Operating Environment software and can be clustered with
up to four nodes for even greater uptime. The Sun Enterprise 10000 server contains up to 64 GB of shared memory and
can support more than 20 TB of storage to confidently handle extreme data warehousing situations.
Sun in Retail
Sun's global retail clients include discount and mass merchandisers, hard and soft goods specialty businesses, department stores, electronic retailing merchants, grocery chains, convenience store chains, chain drug stores, catalog and home shopping.
Fast growing Internet retail companies are building their technology foundations on Sun Enterprise servers and storage. Sun
offers the scalability to meet the unpredictable demands of the seasons and the change in business. Many retailers, including
those mentioned above, trust their mission-critical applications such as merchandising, order processing, corporate financial,
customer relationship management and decision support to Sun and build their platforms on Sun Enterprise Servers.
About Sun Microsystems
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- The Network Is The Computer(TM) - has propelled Sun Microsystems,Inc., to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to ''.com'' their businesses. With $12.4 billion in annual revenues, Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at sun.com.
NOTE: Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, Starfire, Sun Enterprise and' The Network Is The Computer' aretrademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and in other countries. |
