No Reservations About Sun Fire Platform

Case Study: Vacation tour company's upgrade plans include a move to UltraSPARC IV+.

In anticipation of the quickly approaching holidays, vacation tour company Transat A.T. Inc. has revamped its back-end computing infrastructure to avoid any potential turbulence during the winter travel season.

Transat has upgraded the servers that run its main reservations system—replacing Sun Microsystems Inc. Sun Fire 6500 servers with Sun Fire 6900 servers. The new servers, equipped with UltraSPARC IV processors, will allow Transat to not only free up space in its data center but also get a handle on power concerns, said François Guillemette, technology architect of information systems at Transat, in Montreal.

The new systems will also provide a platform that can grow as Transats computing needs increase. The company will add recently released UltraSPARC IV+ processors to its Sun Fire 6900 servers after the holiday season. By doing so, the company expects to gain as much as twice the performance from those machines, Guillemette said.

Click here for eWEEK Labs review of the UltraSPARC IV+-based Sun Fire v490. "Our computer rooms are near capacity, and replacing the older systems with the new ones will give us some breathing room for electricity and heat dissipation," Guillemette said. "The new technology allows us to buy time before we have to upgrade our room infrastructure."

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