SUN Microsystems

OPEN SOURCE. OPEN STANDARDS. OPEN PRACTICES.

SUN OPENS THE WORLD TO TECHNOLOGY.

Sun Microsystems develops solutions that power today's global marketplace. Every day, organisations of all types around the world benefit from Sun's commitment and leadership in technology innovation.

Our customers range from startups and individual developers to governments and the largest global enterprises. Our expansive portfolio of software, systems, services and microelectronics fuels everything from consumer electronics to the world's most powerful data centres. And our network computing platforms are used by nearly every sector of society and power some of the world's best-known companies.

With our innovative technologies, the strength and breadth of our solutions portfolio and our extensive services and support offerings, there are a lot of reasons to consider Sun.

Sun is the leader in network computing innovation. From day one, we've followed a singular vision, "The Network is the Computer^TM", delivering industry-leading technologies that focus on the whole solution - where systems, software, and services combine. With more than 14,000 global patents, we've created breakthroughs that have set the industry direction in network computing. And over the years, we've delivered a vast array of products that have continually demonstrated our expertise, thought leadership, and innovation - products such as:

• Java technology, the most ubiquitous platform, powering more than 5.5 billion devices

• The free and open Solaris OS, the fastest, most reliable, and most secure operating system

• The ZFS file system, a new approach to data management that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity and immense scalability MySQL, the world's most popular open-source database

• The UltraSPARC T1, the industry's first eco responsible processor and UltraSPARC T2, the world's fastest, most energy-efficient processor

• The Sun Fire X4500, the first hybrid data server to combine an x64 server, network fabric and switch, and storage into a single integrated system

• The Sun Modular Datacenter, the first totally virtualised, portable data centre

When it comes to open source, Sun is #1. We've contributed more to the open-source community than any other company. Our software - Java, Solaris, MySQL, OpenOffi ce.org, GlassFish, NetBeans, PostgreSQL, and more - is either already open sourced or in the process of being open sourced. We've even open sourced advanced hardware products such as our UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors.

Why open source? Because it helps increase - and accelerate - innovation. It eliminates vendor lock-in. It reduces the risks in adopting new technologies. And it expands opportunities and markets by providing customers with more and better choices. With open source, we're proving that business growth through sharing is not a paradox.

Getting locked in to one technology platform just doesn't make sense. That's why Sun gives you choice in both hardware and software, so you can freely select what works best for you.

Sun servers are based on three processor families: AMD Opteron x64 processors, Intel Xeon x64 processors, and Sun SPARC and UltraSPARC processors. Our x64 servers are leaders in space and power reduction. Our SPARC servers provide massive scale and hold world-record benchmarks for large ERP and database applications.

And our UltraSPARC processors with CoolThreads technology deliver high performance and energy efficiency with up to 64-way chip multithreading capabilities. Regardless of which processor you choose, Sun servers deliver a secure, flexible platform that combines lower prices and greater energy efficiency with high performance, rapid scalability, and high availability.

To complement our three chip platforms, we offer a choice of three operating systems. And because our middleware runs on each OS, you don't have to settle - you can choose the OS that best fits your needs:

• Linux on x64, x86, and UltraSPARC platforms

• Windows on x64 and x86 platforms

• The open-source Solaris OS, optimised for all three platforms

The Solaris 10 OS has set and re-set dozens of performance and price/performance world records on a wide range of benchmarks, covering a variety of workloads on x64/x86 and SPARC systems of all sizes. With its superior performance, stability and security, Solaris is the one OS that can span the entire enterprise.

At Sun, our goal is to design and build solutions that conserve more, cost less and give you choice. We offer multiple chip platforms and operating systems, so you're not locked in to any one technology. Our software runs on other hardware technologies. Our storage can attach to other platforms. And our services support it all. We deliver all this, with industry leading performance, interoperability and cost and power efficiencies, so that you get exactly what you need to succeed in today's global marketplace.

Our country partner in Ireland is Avnet Technology Solutions. Whether you're looking to reduce cost, minimise your power footprint, move to open source, consolidate and virtualise your applications, or improve scale, performance and security, you should be talking with Sun and Avnet.

For more information on Sun Microsystems, visit ie.sun.com

For more information on our products and solutions, contact Avnet at sun.ie@avnet.com or see stories with SUN on IrishDev.com