Manufacturers around the world are recognising that their legacy mainframe computers are not able to accommodate their current and future enterprise computing requirements. The demands of today`s high-speed, high-volume, multi-user, distributed-computing environment are driving manufacturers towards hardware platforms that guarantee reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS).
Leading manufacturers are choosing powerful, scaleable and cost-effective answers to their system replacement and centralised computing control challenges. And in the U.S. in particular there is a growing list of major manufacturers who rely on the high-availability and datacenter-class performance of the Sun Enterprise 1000 server, popularly known as the Starfire.
"An ever growing number of manufacturers are implementing the Starfire server for their critical business applications," says Rodney Smith, industry executive: manufacturing at Sun Microsystems RSA. "It is a datacenter-class server and earlier this year crossed the threshold of 500 customers, in part due to its popularity in the manufacturing community.
"Manufacturers recognise and appreciate that the Starfire is designed to handle mission critical tasks such as data warehousing, supply chain management, electronic commerce and enterprise resource planning (ERP)."
The customer base includes a range of both discrete and process industries: pharmaceutical and health care companies, such as Glaxo Wellcome Inc; technology product manufacturers, like Siemens Business Services; and discrete product manufacturers, like Kohler Co.
Major manufacturers are putting the Starfire server to work in a variety of ways. Pratt & Whitney, supplier of jet engines, selected Starfire servers to support its global rollout of the SAP R/3 solution, while Motorola, provider of wireless communications, semiconductors and advanced electronic systems and services, chose Sun`s Enterprise 10000 server for supply chain management. IMC Global Inc., producer and marketer of phosphate and potash crop nutrients, animal feed ingredients, salt, soda ash and industrial chemicals, went the Starfire route to satisfy the critical business needs of the organisation, including purchasing, HR, payroll, and accounts payable functions.
"From a price-performance and reliability point of view, the Starfire server was the most cost-effective solution for our mission-critical applications," said Stu Reiter, director of infrastructure services, IMC Global Inc.
The success of the Starfire server in manufacturing can largely be attributed to the system features and functionality that meet enterprise-scale criteria to an unprecedented degree.
The industrial strength Starfire server provides up to eight Dynamic System Domains. Sun is the only UNIX vendor to offer this feature, which provides network managers the ability to dynamically allocate system resources according to the demands of the application. The Starfire server enables customers to run the most demanding, multi-terabyte applications, including those of the major ERP companies, in addition to the more than 12,000 applications for the Solaris environment.
The Starfire server`s ability to meet the growing requirements of data center applications contributed to its role in helping Sun win its third world record for the TPC-D1 TB (SF1000) benchmark. The single node Starfire server was running the Solaris operating environment and Oracle 8i database. The benchmark award demonstrates how large companies can process and store more data than ever before by using the Starfire server.
In addition, the Starfire server was the first UNIX system to offer dynamic reconfiguration and alternate pathing for high availability, and the server can be clustered with up to four nodes for ever greater up-time.
Share
Editorial contacts