Sun Microsystems Inc and Oracle Corp continue their joint collaboration around a set of integrated Grid computing solutions designed to help commercial enterprises harness the power of Grid computing and to achieve better utilization of existing IT assets.

With the Grid computing market estimated to reach as much as $12 billion by the year 2007, Sun and Oracle are committed to providing customers with next generation data center solutions on both 32- and 64-bit platforms, backed by the power and innovation of Sun's Solaris Operating System (OS). Today, information technology executives are more frequently considering Grid computing solutions for commercial enterprise computing applications including stock transactions, payroll management, sales orders, deliveries and inventory control. In fact, nearly two-thirds of companies surveyed earlier this year indicated that they were already using -- or were interested in using -- Grid technology for these repetitious and storage intensive operations.

To help lower the barrier of entry to Grid computing, the two companies created a Grid Reference Architecture for Oracle 10g software, providing customers with a set of tested and tuned guidelines for implementing a Grid computing solution. This documented proof-of-concept deployment architecture can decrease the complexity of decision-making and deployment, while increasing reliability and lowering risk for potential customers. The Grid Reference Architecture was created jointly by Sun and Oracle engineers and has been proven to reduce total-cost-of-ownership, while saving implementation time.

"Many of today's data centers can be described as cost-ineffective, due to low utilization of resources," said Bjorn Andersson, director of Grid marketing at Sun Microsystems Inc. "Together with Oracle, we continue to provide customers proven building blocks for Grid based on Sun Fire systems, the Solaris OS, Sun StorEdge, software and services, which can easily be configured to transform poor-performing data centers into a competitive weapon."

To keep costs low and continue to provide advanced technologies, Sun recently announced Sun Cluster and Oracle RAC support on shared file systems, as well as a new Sun Cluster Oracle RAC SVM Edition that enables powerful volume management of Oracle RAC deployments. This comprehensive Sun and Oracle solution helps ensure that customer deployments receive the highest levels of reliability, availability and support.

"We are committed to providing customers with choice and flexibility when it comes to Grid computing," said Prem Kumar, vice president of Server Technologies for Oracle Corp. "Our work with Sun around Oracle Database 10g continues to focus on delivering solutions that maximize asset utilization and decrease overall IT costs -- a value proposition that resonates with organizations of all sizes, in all industries."

About Sun Microsystems Inc

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems Inc to its position as a 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://sun.com/.