Sun Microsystems Inc. Thursday said was able to sell two 24-CPU, 900 MHz Sun Fire 6800 Midframe servers, including a storage area network (SAN)
of Sun StorEdge 9960 systems to ISP giant and regular customer EarthLink .
Financial terms of the sale will not be revealed, said Sun spokeswoman Liza Santos.
Feeling the pressure of an increased subscriber base, the No.4 ISP in the U.S. picked up the hardware to improve the operations of
its billing and data warehousing applications. Specifically, the servers will help EarthLink handle approximately 4.8 million
customer records and will eventually be able to eliminate the last of its remote billing operations, creating greater operational
efficiencies and reducing costs.
“We are very pleased with our return on investment, and we believe that Sun Microsystems has the expertise and technology to help us
increase our billing capacity,” said Mike Sugg, customer financial system manager, EarthLink.
Sun has done business with Earthlink for the last few years, but things really picked up In January 2002 when Sun said EarthLink had
tabbed it for four 24-CPU, 900 MHz Sun Fire 6800 servers. Thursday’s announcement builds on that deal, as Sun continues to do fierce
battle with IBM Computer Corp. in the midframe server market.