Sun Microsystems, Inc., has announced that Ciena Corporation, the network specialist, has selected Sun Microsystems' leading x64 (x86, 64-bit) Sun Fire servers for its electronic design automation (EDA) platform, in order to improve the speed of its simulation and testing capabilities. Ciena purchased 30 Sun Fire V20z servers powered by the AMD Opteron processor, which have improved Ciena's ability to design and test its ADSL2+ telecommunications solutions by a factor of four compared to its previous systems.

Steven Rennick, lead network systems engineer, Ciena Corporation said, "In almost every head-to-head test we conducted, the Sun Fire V20z servers based on the AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture proved faster than the comparable systems we evaluated."

Ciena Corporation supplies networking systems, software and services designed to target and cure specific network pain points to help its customers best exploit the latest applications and reduce their cost of network ownership. Motivated by a steady desire to improve the capabilities and innovation of its products and processes, Ciena's digital ASIC design team evaluated various existing EDA solutions and found that most lack the computing performance Ciena requires to run its unique design and testing simulations. Ciena's ASIC design team ultimately turned to Sun, purchasing Sun Fire V20z servers in order to more efficiently run the necessary computer-aided engineering applications for its design simulations.

"For Ciena, simulation and testing is a critical part of delivering a reliable ASIC, which is a key element of our ADSL2+ solutions," Rennick added. "The proprietary enterprise license blade system we used previously did not offer enough compute power to run all of the simulations in the necessary timeframes. Once we moved to the Sun Fire V20z servers with the AMD Opteron processor we were able to easily deliver the results and meet our tight manufacturing deadlines," Rennick added.

"With such an extensive footprint, Ciena demands processing solutions in its data centers that require minimal maintenance and support, and the Sun Fire V20z servers significantly reduce Ciena's time, effort and cost of managing its hardware," said Lisa Sieker, vice president of marketing, Network Systems Group at Sun Microsystems, Inc. "We are pleased to provide Ciena with lightning-fast Sun Fire V20z servers powered with the AMD Opteron processor, which run 32- and 64-bit applications faster than virtually any other system available, and also provide the flexibility of running Solaris, standard Linux distributions and Windows operating systems."

Sun is now shipping the Sun Fire V20z server with the Dual-core AMD Opteron processor. These systems are designed to increase the performance of compute-intensive applications, specifically for grid-based and cluster-based computing, as well as for high performance and technical computing.

For more information about the Sun Fire V20z servers, please visit: http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v20z.