The need to develop data archiving capabilities is a challenge that every enterprise faces these days for any or all of several needs: whether to accommodate explosive data growth; to respond to the pressure to meet promised service levels and backup windows for users; to provide archive data retention and retrieval requirements; and to better manage rising energy costs. Dean Halbeisen's Sun BluePrints Online paper "Sun Systems for Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup Software" details the openly architected, intelligent and massively scalable general purpose archive solutions Sun is developing to assist enterprise users in meeting these challenges.

The City of San Antonio (CoSA) allows its residents to pay a traffic ticket, apply for a job, or find information about the dozens of activities online. As its server infrastructure had sprawled to keep pace with its service delivery, CoSA decided to upgrade its IT infrastructure to reduce space, maintenance costs, and enhance service. The solution: Sun’s SPARC servers as a platform for Solaris 10 and Solaris Zones, which provided the best roadmap for return on investment (ROI) with its virtualization technologies and energy-efficient, mainframe-class servers.

Monmouth Independence Network (MINET) is a public utility that delivers voice, data and cable services to 3,500 customers in the cities of Monmouth and Independence, Oregon, using Sun technologies. Faced with the need to expand services while minimizing costs, providing for high performance and availability and scaling to support rapid growth, MINET looked to Sun for the servers, unified storage, flash memory, thin clients, and virtualization necessary to meet these business needs.