Sun Microsystems Tackles Cost-Effective Consolidation With Entry-Level Servers

Time Warner Cable and National Center for Missing & Exploited Children Benefit From Reduced Complexity and Low Total Cost of Ownership

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW - news) UltraSPARC(TM) processor-based, entry-level systems and services help deliver a low total cost of ownership (TCO) to customers and tackle their data center infrastructure problems.

"Sun has always been committed to providing our customers with products that have high-end features at low cost points," said Neil Knox, vice president and general manager of Sun's Volume Systems Products. "Our customers are demanding the ability to consolidate their systems and decrease management complexity while adding increased reliability, availability and scalability. Sun's existing products and services are already providing customers with the solutions they are demanding and our new offerings announced today will raise the bar in the industry for improving TCO."

Consulting, education and support services from Sun, coupled with Sun's products, make for a potent combination for any-size organization to work with to realize the benefits of minimizing TCO through system migration and consolidation. Two of Sun's customers who realize the benefits of this combination are Time Warner Cable and National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Time Warner Cable

Faced with meeting an average call load of 30,000 per day, Time Warner Cable turned to Sun to quickly upgrade, develop and deploy a high-performance call-center infrastructure to provide its 400 customer service representatives with near real-time system performance. Sun Professional Services promptly recommended a solution which included upgrading Time Warner Cable's system of Sun SPARC(TM) 4 and 5 workstations and X-Terminals to 450 Sun Ray(TM) appliances, 15 Sun Enterprise(TM) 420R servers and two Sun Enterprise 450 servers all running on the Solaris(TM) Operating Environment (OE).

"Our customer service representatives were hindered by slow application performance and eight minutes of downtime when in the event of desktop failure," said Cesar Beltran, Vice President of Information Technology for Time Warner Cable. "After working with Sun to design and implement the new system architecture, we have improved our application performance almost eight fold and reduced the eight minutes of downtime to mere seconds. We look forward to tracking Sun's new products and services to benefit our business' bottom-line."

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC)

When new, federal laws mandated ISPs to report child pornography incidents to the NCMEC, the organization needed to create a second generation of its web incident reporting site -- CyberTipline II -- to support the anticipated volume in traffic. Sun was chosen to develop and provision an architecture that was highly scalable with a low TCO. The group deployed a network comprised of two Sun's Enterprise 450 servers, ten Sun's Enterprise 220R servers, one Sun's Enterprise 250 server, two Sun's StorEdge(TM) D1000 disk arrays all running on the Solaris 8 OE.

According to Peg Flick, the NCMEC's Director of Information Technology Development, "Sun's consultants provided exactly what we needed: a high-performance, reliable, scalable and secure architecture. Together, we were able to quickly consolidate and migrate from our older system to the new one in time to meet the spike in demand."

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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 take their businesses to the nth. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com.

NOTE: Sun, the Sun logo, Sun Microsystems, Sun Enterprise Sun Ray, Stor Edge and Solaris and Java are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and in other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

CONTACT: Angie Devlin of Sun Microsystems, Inc., +1-303-272-9505, or angie.devlin@sun.com; or Dan Larusso for Sun Microsystems, Inc., +1-303-634-2632, or dlarusso@alexanderogilvy.com.