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Major Educational Institutions Choose Sun to Help Tackle Key IT Challenges

Posted on: Tuesday, 10 October 2006, 09:00 CDT

DALLAS, EDUCAUSE Booth #511, Oct. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- This year at EDUCAUSE 2006, Sun Microsystems, Inc. will demonstrate the technologies that major higher education institutions worldwide are using to tackle their most pressing IT challenges. At its EDUCAUSE booth (#511), Sun will showcase open standards-based solutions that target top customer technology issues such as building efficient and scalable data centers, managing and protecting network identities, handling the explosion of content and reducing energy costs.

"In the face of rising enrollments and shrinking budgets, the education industry is undergoing a major shift in the technology space toward open standards, open content and open source-based software," said Kim Jones, Vice President of Global Education, Government and Health Sciences at Sun Microsystems. "Open systems and software improve interoperability, enhance collaborative learning and protect against vendor lock-in. Sun's unique systems approach gives customers the software, services, storage and systems they need to help them tackle their biggest IT issues, allowing them to focus on improving the quality of education."

Building Efficient and Scalable Data Centers

As they work to build a Digital Campus that connects faculty, staff and students, today's academic institutions are looking for ways to simplify and optimize their data centers. Institutions such as the California State University system and Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium chose Sun for these reasons. The Solaris 10 OS provides the backbone for this network and helps customers build efficient and scalable data centers and enhance developer productivity. It supports critical network capabilities, offering iron-clad security, reliability and performance.

The free and open source Solaris 10 Operating System, the most advanced OS on the planet, helps customers build efficient and scalable data centers by supporting critical network capabilities and offering iron-clad security, reliability and performance. With features that increase security and drive up server utilization, such as DTrace, Solaris Containers, Predictive Self-Healing and Solaris ZFS, Solaris 10 is the ideal platform for server consolidation, reduced infrastructure costs and record breaking performance (with over 100 performance world records to date.) For more information, visit http://www.sun.com/solaris.

Managing Network Identities and Securing the Network

Another key challenge for higher education institutions is the issue of managing network identities and securing the network while still providing access to a complex array of applications such as research collaboration and e-learning. Several prominent universities -- including the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Baylor College of Medicine and University of Salford in the United Kingdom -- have selected the Sun Java Identity Management Suite to help them provision and de-provision users, standardize user identities and passwords and provide role-based access. For more information, please visit http://www.sun.com/software/products/identity .

Reducing Energy Costs

As energy prices soar, educational institutions are scrambling for ways to reduce their power consumption. This is no easy feat at a time when the campus data center is facing ever-heavier demands: more and more academic and administrative functions are moving online. Libraries are digitizing their collections, requiring ever-increasing amounts of storage. Students are expecting anywhere, any time access. Yet many campus data centers are housed in aging facilities that lack the latest energy-saving technologies.

To help control data center energy costs, Sun offers deep discounts to educational institutions on the Sun Fire T2000 server and Sun Fire T1000 servers with CoolThreads(TM) technology. Delivering breakthrough performance with dramatic space and power efficiency, these systems are simply the best, most energy-efficient space-saving platforms on the planet for Web- and application-tier processing.

In addition, institutions such as ACEnet, ARRI, Oregon State University, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas, the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California have chosen Sun Fire systems powered by AMD Opteron processors, the highest- performance x64 processors on the market, which set new standards for performance, reliability and energy efficiency. These systems consume about one-third the power, provide one and a half times the performance, and cost half as much as comparably configured four-way servers from Dell. For more information, please visit: http://www.sun.com/systems .

Dealing with the Explosion of Content

Whether they're digitizing the contents of their libraries or managing the massive data sets that result from advanced research collaborations, universities need efficient ways to store, manage and protect their data. Educational and research institutions such as the U.S. Library of Congress, The Research Foundation of State University of New York (RFSUNY) and TACC have turned to Sun for help in managing this explosion of data and content.

Sun delivers a systems approach to data, enabling customers to better store and manage information over the course of its lifecycle. For more information, please visit: http://www.sun.com/storagetek .

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 sun.com.

FOR MORE INFORMATION Melissa Pereira Sun Microsystems, Inc. Phone: 408.884.4980 email: melissa.pereira@sun.com Asa Fenton Bite Communications Phone: 415.365.0482 email: asa.fenton@bitepr.com

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

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

CONTACT: Melissa Pereira of Sun Microsystems, Inc., +1-408-884-4980, ormelissa.pereira@sun.com; or Asa Fenton of Bite Communications, +1-415-365-0482, or asa.fenton@bitepr.com, for Sun

Web site: http://sun.com/

Source: PRNewswire-FirstCall

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