Sun has been certified under the J.D. Power and Associates Certified Technology Service and Support Program due to its outstanding customer support in North America. Sun earned this certification by scoring in the top 20 percent for high customer satisfaction among technology support organizations and is the first major network infrastructure solutions vendor to be certified.

Sun is piloting a payments processing system using the SWIFT ISO 20022 XML global financial messaging standard and the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) software to process the transmission of payments data to Bank of America, a key provider of treasury services to Sun. This treasury project is part of a major redesign of Sun's business-to-business IT infrastructure which eventually will be an XML-based service-oriented architecture (SOA).

ODIN Fund Management, second in Norway's domestic equity fund market, selected the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) as its integration framework for the adoption of the SWIFTNet messaging infrastructure. Java CAPS was recently certified with the SWIFT Gold Label for the ninth year in a row.

Touting the best product and solution portfolio in its 25-history, Sun is aimed at growing its channel business from $3 billion to $7 billion by 2010, and eventually to $10 billion, Sun executives said at this year's New Frontiers conference for Sun partners.

John Fowler, newly named executive vice president in charge of Sun 's merged storage and server divisions, shared his views in an eWeek feature by staff writer Scott Ferguson on how the company might fare in the current market.

Sun Distinguished Engineer Harriet Coverston, chief architect of QFS, has enjoyed a career studded with achievements and acclaim. Yet, her current project at Sun, which she describes as "...the biggest paradigm shift in storage in more than 30 years," promises even further renown.

In this TechWebcast, Sun Microsystem's partner Fotolog shows creative ways used to scale their Web 2.0 architecture and MySQL Enterprise with Solaris 10 advanced features. Unlike typical scalability presentations which focus on the entire stack, Fotolog will emphasize on the role that understanding one's application, operating system and storage engine can play in addressing scalability challenges.

Learn more about the Sun-Blackboard Reference Architecture for Throughput Computing in a webcast hosted by Kevin Roebuck that features Steve Feldman, the director of Performance Engineering and Architecture at Blackboard and James Simon, Sun chief technologist from the Global Education and Research Group.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 offers better price/performance than all IBM and HP servers when tested on the Lotus R6iNotes on Domino mail server benchmark using Lotus Domino 7.0.1 mail server. The Sun UltraSPARC T2 server also delivered industry-leading results in best per-socket performance and best power-performance.

An informal performance study shows WebSphere Application Server V 6.1 gets double the performance on the new Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220 UltraSPARC T2 servers than it did previously on the Sun Fire T2000 server. Dileep Kumar shares performance-enhancing tips he used on the App Server to maximize the power of these new Niagara 2 servers.

Sun has lowered the price on its Sun Fire/Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 servers, as well as Sun Blade T6300 servers due to the overall drop in memory, the company reports. The new price changes, which went into effect October 9th, are expected to bring these Sun products onto a competitive level with similar offering.

The Sun StorageTek 9985V Storage System offers new thin provisioning capability with Dynamic Provisioning software, application-centric storage management, unified data replication across heterogeneous storage systems and a cross-bar switch-based architecture design that allows performance to scale with capacity.

The Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager (CAM) software simplifies storage management with a common, simple-to-use interface, making it easy to accelerate deployment and work with Sun StorageTek systems from different families. Version 6.0 is now available and can be downloaded for free from the Sun Download Center.

Given the explosive growth in the volume of corporate communications shared on the Internet, Sun and Open Text Livelink Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a solution that can ensure the access, control and lifecycle management of information. Open Text has integrated the Sun Java System Identity Manager into its product line to require the authentication and authorization required of secure system and it has developed the Data Archiving for SAP Solutions, which extends the umbrella of security to all SAP related data.

Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for the last 4 issues. The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 116 Issue 2, were:

• Sun xVM Infrastructure Previewed: Sun xVM Server and Sun xVM Ops Center [18756]
• UltraSPARC T2 Servers and Sun xVM: The Ultimate Virtualization Combo [18786]
• The New UltraSPARC T2 Systems: T5120/T5220 Servers and Sun Blade T6320 [18776]
• Detailed System Overview of New T5120/T5220 Servers [18798]
• Just Who Is That Guy with the Ponytail? [18765]
• The OpenDS Project - Not Just a Directory Server [18726]
• Latest Version of Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office Released [18743]
• Laptop Security Breaches Highlight Benefits of Sun Ray Thin Clients [18730]
• SPOTWorld and Emulated Sun SPOTs - Latest Developments in Project Sun SPOT [18741]
• The Ins and Outs of OpenOffice.org's Base [18721]
  (Get More Information . .)

Java screams on Sun UltraSPARC T2 declares David Dagastine in his October 9th blog, noting, "The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 servers equipped with a single UltraSPARC T2 processor at 1.4GHz, delivered a World Record single-chip result of 192,055 SPECjbb2005 bops, 24,007 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM. An average of 464 Watts of power to obtain this result. This result beats the previous SPECjbb2005 single-chip world record by 71%."

Sun Labs Voice Bridge is now an open source project named jVoiceBridge. This Java application handles Voice over IP (VoIP) audio communication and mixing for tasks such as conference calls, voice chat, speech detection and audio for 3D virtual environments.

When governmental bodies decided on Daylight Saving Time (DST), they didn't have JRE in mind. However, it is important to keep JRE updated with the latest DST rules to ensure that Java technology-based applications always know the exact time in a given location.