NEWS BRIEFS

Denver, COLO. — Mincom, Inc. and Sun Microsystems have conducted a benchmark using a Sun Enterprise platform. The study revealed that Mincom’s Ellipse, the latest version of the company’s flagship enterprise application solution MIMS Open Enterprise, has the capacity to support at least 10,000 concurrent users while operating in a UNIX environment. This is the highest level of performance ever achieved by Mincom.

The benchmark tested Ellipse using BEA Tuxedo middle-ware port and Oracle 8i on Sun Enterprise 10000 servers. The project enabled Mincom to run 10,000 users and its full suite of Ellipse applications concurrently on a single Sun Enterprise 10000 StarFire server to test the robustness and performance of the load in a UNIX environment.

Mincom’s President of North American operations, Larry Hagewood, said this performance is an outstanding result for Mincom clients, because they will benefit from lower enterprise ownership costs.

“These extraordinary responses will generate increased user satisfaction,” Mr. Hagewood said. “For our clients, this translates as high end-user value. The transaction response times during the test were better than 0.5 seconds at the client and less than 0.2 seconds at the server on average – a truly great result,” Mr. Hagewood said.

The workload processed a total of 1.1 million transaction requests over one hour with a mean response time of 1.2 seconds, utilizing 95 percent of the CPU on the Enterprise 10000. The average throughput over the entire run was about 300 transactions per second.

Another run included 8,000 concurrent virtual users with the same workload processing a total of 947,000 transaction requests with a mean response time of 0.35 seconds, utilizing 64 percent of the CPU on the Sun Enterprise 10000. Average throughput during the entire run was 250 transactions per second.

“The Sun Enterprise 10000 platform also exhibited excellent scalability from a CPU resource utilization for workloads from 1,200 to 10,000 concurrent users,” Mr. Hagewood said. “This is by far the largest user count on a single box for the premier Mincom applications suite, Ellipse. It not only demonstrates the scalability and flexibility of Ellipse, but also the processing power and reliability of the Sun Enterprise 10000 server and Solaris Operating Environment.

“Our enterprise applications software is used by a variety of organizations ranging from the relatively small to the very large, and all customers can be satisfied that the Ellipse architecture will permit them to grow their business usage in an extremely cost effective and efficient manner,” he concluded.

The benchmark study was conducted at Sun Microsystem’s Customer Benchmark Center in Menlo Park, California. Sun customers use the center to create proof of concepts and develop architectural blueprints in a lab/enterprise environment. The facilities enable Sun, its partners and customers to develop and test dot-com solutions and provide access to a full range of hardware, software and supporting facilities from Sun, its partners and competitors.

Mincom, Inc. designs and delivers total enterprise applications solutions for capital asset-dependent companies in the utility, transportation, mining, oil and gas, and defense and government industries. Mincom serves customers in more than 40 countries through four business units providing applications software, professional services, Tequinox for ASP (Application Service Provider) offerings and internet electronic documentation. Mincom’s North American headquarters is in Denver, CO. Mincom partners with other global companies, including IBM, Caterpillar Inc., Deloitte Consulting, Andersen Consulting, Oracle, PricewaterhouseCoopers, BEA Inc. and Sterling Commerce.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision – The Network Is The Computer – has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc., to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to dot-com their businesses. With $15.7 billion in annual revenues, Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com .

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