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EarthLink upgrades Sun servers, storage

EarthLink, a customer of Sun Microsystems servers since its inception, has upgraded its servers with Sun's next-to-top-end Sun Fire 6800 systems, the companies said Thursday. The two 6800s, with 24 processors and 48GB of memory apiece, are replacing two 20-processor E6500 systems for the job of running 22 Progress Software databases used in EarthLink's most demanding task, handling customer registration, billing and managing accounts, said Ron Williams, enterprise production services manager for EarthLink. The systems--which will be arranged in a "fail-over" configuration using software from Veritas so one can take over if the other crashes--handle about 8,000 to 10,000 transactions per second, he said. In addition, EarthLink replaced its StorEdge 5200 storage system with a top-end StorEdge 9960 and storage networking switches from Brocade Communications, Williams said. EarthLink overall has about 250 Sun servers, he added.

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EarthLink, a customer of Sun Microsystems servers since its inception, has upgraded its servers with Sun's next-to-top-end Sun Fire 6800 systems, the companies said Thursday. The two 6800s, with 24 processors and 48GB of memory apiece, are replacing two 20-processor E6500 systems for the job of running 22 Progress Software databases used in EarthLink's most demanding task, handling customer registration, billing and managing accounts, said Ron Williams, enterprise production services manager for EarthLink. The systems--which will be arranged in a "fail-over" configuration using software from Veritas so one can take over if the other crashes--handle about 8,000 to 10,000 transactions per second, he said.

In addition, EarthLink replaced its StorEdge 5200 storage system with a top-end StorEdge 9960 and storage networking switches from Brocade Communications, Williams said. EarthLink overall has about 250 Sun servers, he added.