Vendor alliances: Sun and Microsoft open center to foster working relationships between products
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 3/17/2008 4:31:00 PM
Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have announced two new milestones in their ongoing alliance:
• The official opening of the Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center on Microsoft’s Redmond campus for optimizing Microsoft applications on Sun Fire x64 server systems storage; and
• The availability of the Sun Infrastructure Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.
“Our customers and partners want to maximize their business efficiency, and we are helping them do that by opening the new Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center,” Bob Kelly, corporate VP of infrastructure server marketing at Microsoft, said at the center’s ribbon-cutting ceremony last week.
Lisa Sieker, VP of systems marketing at Sun, said the center will be “a test bed for running key Microsoft applications on Sun’s x64 servers to ensure seamless integration between the technologies.”
Objectives of the Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center, say the operating partners, will include optimization of Microsoft applications on Sun x64 systems and storage, and promotion of full interoperability in application areas such as virtualization, Java technology, systems management, and identity. In addition, the center will collaborate with authorized Sun Solution Centers to support customers in running their own proof-of-concept testing. Customers can minimize their risk and shorten time-to-deployment by simulating their own environment, with access to top architects from both Sun and Microsoft.
The Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center serves as a working lab for tuning, benchmarking, and interoperability solutions creation. It will be designed to include these capabilities:
• A demonstration and testing area for Windows on Sun x64 systems and storage;
• A lab space for customer proofs-of-concept focused on Windows Server 2008 on Sun x64 systems and storage;
• The ability to certify Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), including Sun’s Java Runtime Environment (JRE) software for and with Microsoft operating environments and applications;
• Joint work to enable cross-platform server virtualization, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Sun xVM; and
• Cross-company collaboration to allow Sun Ray thin-client software to provide a first-rate virtual desktop for the Windows environment and support Windows technologies.
One of the first results of the recently increased collaboration is the availability of the Sun Infrastructure Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. This solution will enable enterprise customers to better manage email growth and realize the benefits of Exchange Server 2007.
The Interoperability Center expands Sun’s three-year presence on the Microsoft main campus, focused on testing customer scenarios on Sun’s systems in the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center. Microsoft and Sun have collaborated in a number of interoperability areas, including:
• Web services;
• Identity management;
• Thin clients;
• Systems management; and
• Windows Server engineering.
The two companies also created a basis for tighter interoperability between Java Platform, Java EE, the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 and Windows Communication Foundation in Sun’s Web services interoperability technologies (Project Tango). Corporations also can evaluate the Sun Fire X4600 server with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 through Sun’s Try and Buy program.
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