Many MySQL customers start by using the community edition and support for the community. As they grow and become successful, they then look for a guaranteed level of support. Marktplaats.nl, the largest E-commerce platform in The Netherlands and part of eBay since 2004, is such a customer.

To enable their fast growth, protect site uptime, and contain IT expenses, the company is using a flexible and scalable infrastructure based on open source technology such as MySQL - backed by Sun's 24x7 global database support team.

Sun has again made a name for itself by releasing the World’s first one terabyte Tape Storage Drive. For better datacenter efficiency and also cutting the cost per Gigabyte, the Sun StorageTek T10000B Tape Drive offers customers an entire terabyte of capacity. This new storage device works with open or mainframe systems and stores on a single cartridge.

"Breakthrough Performance at $1 per Gigabyte"

Sun’s J4000 storage family is ideal for customers looking to manage growing data and keep a grip on datacenter costs. Compatible with Solaris, Windows and Linux platforms, the J4000 family offers heterogeneous, scalable, reliable storage that can be used as the building blocks for cost effective storage systems.

OpenSolaris offers free, built-in features that help you build, debug, and deploy new applications faster. You get access to unique Solaris 10 features, including Dynamic Tracing, Solaris Containers, and Predictive Self-Healing. Plus, you also get the ZFS file system for data protection, scalability, and hardly any administration.

The storage announcements from Sun this week were:

• Sun Storage J4200 system: With up to 12 drives per tray and up to 48 SAS/SATA drives;

• Sun Storage J4400 system: Offers 24 drives per tray, up to 6 SAS ports, up to max 192 3.5" SAS/SATA drives;

• Sun Storage J4500: Four rack unit offers an industry-leading 48 drives per tray, up to four SAS ports and up to 480 3.5" SATA Drives;

• Sun StorageTek SAS RAID HBA: Host based RAID HBA allows the Sun Storage J4000 systems to connect directly to servers through one or more high speed interfaces for highly scalable external storage expansion. (Solaris, Linux, or Windows)

Customers can also trade in old storage systems. The Sun Upgrade Advantage Program provides trade-in credit for qualified storage systems resulting in savings of up to 20%.

Sun has just unveiled Project Wonderland for Immersive Education, an open source virtual world toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds in which users in the education community can communicate with audio and share live applications such as Web browsers, OpenOffice.org suite documents and games. The debut featured secure and flexible virtual learning environments created by Boston College, the University of Essex, the University of Oregon and Saint Paul College, pioneer users of the platform for educational purposes. The demonstration was coordinated by the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative and the Sun Immersion Special Interest Group (Sun ISIG).CommonNeed, Sun’s hosting partner for Project Wonderland, also participated.

Sun and Intel posted the results of a benchmark that shows a Sun server running Reuters Market Data System 6.0.3 (RMDS). The results show a million+ message per second at a record-breaking low latency on a gigabit Ethernet link. The benchmark was conducted using Intel-based Sun Fire X4150 servers with dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon X5460 3.16 GHz processors, running Solaris 10 OS technologies and utilizing a 1Gb Ethernet network infrastructure.