Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

I spent the day visiting Sun's interoperability center located at Microsoft's Redmond WA campus, home to the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center (MPSC). This is one of the best kept secrets at Sun (and Microsoft too I think). The MPSC has a complete lab of Sun x86 servers and storage dedicated to running Microsoft benchmarks and proof of concept studies for Sun customers. It is staffed by both Microsoft engineers as well as Sun engineers from my x86 sales team. Any Sun customer can use the center to design and prove out their Microsoft solution before purchasing systems from Sun to run it on.

While most of the work done at MPSC is confidential due to the customer nature of it, the MPSC also hosts a number of other Microsoft labs besides the Sun interoperability center. Microsoft loved Sun's x86 servers so much they even purchased additional Sun x4450 servers to consolidate over 700 existing physical servers and then published a case study of how they did it! Boy, for a 15 year Sun veteran, how times have changed!

Quite coincidentally to the timing of my visit, today Sun also announced new Sun virtualization solutions for small and medium businesses using both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware. OK, I didn't spend a lot of time today talking about VMware. We have lots of partners that can help you design and deploy Microsoft solutions including virtualization with Hyper-V for Exchange, SQL-Server, or other Microsoft apps including Avanade. Avanade is a global IT consultancy dedicated to using the Microsoft platform to help enterprises achieve profitable growth and they are absolutely one of the best to help you deploying Microsoft software and solutions on Sun. But if all you need is a couple of Windows servers, you might want to consider CDW which carries a broad range of Sun x86 servers for running Windows, VMware, and of course Solaris too.