ETSA Utilities, South Australia's primary electricity distributors with 800,000 residential and business customers, faced the task of upgrading its legacy IT infrastructure that hosts the company's ERP system while at the same time improving the processing time of ERP system jobs and increasing the availability of ERP mission-critical systems. In addition, ETSA sought to reduce payroll processing time and improve data load time. The utility found the infrastructure it was looking for in the Sun product line.

The newly available enhanced SPARC Enterprise M3000 server from Sun and Fujitsu comes with the new quad-core 2.75GHz SPARC64 VII processor that offers 23 percent greater performance than its predecessor, the companies say. The upgraded SPARC M3000 system is an entry-level server with the RAS features of mid-range and high-end servers and can be used to consolidate multiple low-end systems to save money and space.

When the South African government launched its largest (both in South Africa and the continent as a whole) supercomputer at CHPC in Cape Town, Marc Hamilton, Sun VP of Americas Systems Practice was there to interview Naledi Pandor, South African Minister of Science and Technology, on the system and the Sun technology at its core - the second generation Sun Constellation System.