In a multimillion-rand deal, the Namibian power generation utility, Nampower, has selected Sun Microsystems to provide the infrastructure for its SAP/R3 enterprise resource planning project.
The equipment, including three Sun Fire V880 servers running the Unix-based Solaris operating environment, and two 3910 StorEdge arrays was supplied through sole Namibian Sun channel partner and service provider, AST Namibia.
The solution also incorporates products from StorageTek and Veritas Software.
According to Nampower's IT Systems administrator, Otto van Zyl, the company recently embarked on an enterprise project to replace its legacy applications.
"After a business process review, the SAP application suite on Unix was chosen. A rigorous selection procedure, which focused on criteria such as low cost of ownership, high performance and reliability, identified the Sun hardware solution proposed by AST Namibia as the preferred infrastructural platform evaluated against the alternative options available in the market," he adds.
"We chose Sun Microsystems because we have been using Sun hardware for the past six years and have found the products to be very reliable while requiring a minimum of maintenance," he explains.
"In addition, the company sought servers that could deliver optimal price-performance with low upgrade costs to keep the total cost of ownership down," he says.
Indeed, says AST Namibia general manager: IT Solutions Dirk van Niekerk: "The determining factor for selecting Sun as the basis for our proposal was the price/performance and scalability offered by the platform."
Furthermore, the Solaris operating environment and Veritas product suite comprising the solution satisfied the high availability requirements of NamPower, while its legacy applications are also hosted on Sun.
Sun's willingness to demonstrate the capabilities of its product set also found favour with Nampower. "Sun SA exemplified the commitment to its products by providing equipment for on-site testing at no cost for a period of more than six months," Van Zyl says.
And with security being an ever-present concern, the company favoured Solaris because of its proven reliability and abundant security options.
According to research from IDC, the Sun Fire V880 is the world's top selling 8-way server. "The V880 delivers mainframe-class performance and reliability at the cost of a midrange system. What's more, these machines are capable of meeting the memory intensive and scalability requirements that companies like Nampower demand for production applications," says Paul Mostert, regional partner manager at Sun Microsystems sub-Saharan Africa.
Mostert notes that Sun is an approved platform for SAP applications, and as such there are several installations of the ERP suite on Sun hardware in the southern African region. He adds that Sun has also had good relations with the integrators, Accenture and AST, that worked on this project.
"Working together with AST Namibia, we were able to provide Nampower with the optimum hardware solution to support their critical business requirements," he concludes.
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Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com.
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