NEWS BRIEFS

Palo Alto, CA — Sun Microsystems, Inc., announced it set an industry record in the newly released SAP Standard Bank Customer Accounts (BCA) application benchmark.

Sun Enterprise 10000 servers and Sun StorEdge arrays processed over 3.57 million postings to bank accounts per hour in day processing and over 3.21 million accounts balanced per hour in night processing, demonstrating the leading performance of the combined SAP Banking Applications and Sun platform in delivering exceptional speed and volume performance for processing multiple types of banking transactions. For the banking industry, the ability to handle a high volume of transactions at high-speed from a central location is a business imperative.

In addition, Sun and SAP have joined together and run a series of performance tests for SAP Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) for Banking, especially developed for the banking industry that reflect the requirements of both retail and investment banking. For any bank, the control and management of revenues, costs and risks is a core process. In the area of SAP SEM for Banking, banks must process large numbers of transactions quickly and have immediate access to the results. At the same time, the complexity of the valuation rules is constantly increasing as is the need for flexibility and being cost-effective, such as is needed in risk, profit and strategy analysis.

“The certified SAP BCA Banking benchmarks performed on Sun servers, demonstrate that Sun excels at the diverse applications that are important to large banks,” said Greg Rucki, director, global SAP business unit at Sun Microsystems, Inc. “In addition, the Sun Enterprise 10000 can run at extremely high system utilizations on 64-CPU without issue. Bankers and their IT departments can feel secure with choosing Sun servers.”

The outstanding results stand to open new opportunities in the banking market for both companies, with Sun providing data center class performance, security, and reliability and SAP demonstrating its ability to replace legacy applications in large banking centers. The combined success has implications for the central offices, branch offices, home banking and emerging distributed computing environments.

Today, modern banks must provide customers with round the clock, real-time access to their current data and conduct account transactions, 365 days a year. At the same time, it must be ensured that batch processes, such as account balancing or the creation of bank statements can be processed simultaneously. Both require an increased throughput of transactions and are essential elements of an efficient customer retention policy.

The BCA benchmark consists of two different workloads, the day processing and the night processing. The day processing consists of batch and online postings as well as display of balances and statements occurring at the same time. The breakdown of postings and displays as performed by the Sun Enterprise 10000 configuration is as follows:

— 3,000,000 batch postings per hour to bank accounts

— 577,000 online postings per hour to bank accounts

— display of 461,000 bank statements per hour

— display of 231,000 account balances per hour

— display of 115,000 turnover information per hour

In contrast, the night processing consists of account balancing for the purpose of calculating interests and charges and posting both interests and charges to the bank accounts. This bulk workload must be processed within a given timeframe. The main results of the benchmark test showed that BCA on Sun servers processed over 3.2 million balanced accounts per hour.

For more information visit http://www.sun.com

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