Sun Microsystems on Monday announced that it has won a five-year, US$200 million contract with Eastman Kodak Co. to expand its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system by as much as five times its current size.
Kodak said its system, now based on more than 100TB of Sun StorEdge arrays and 120 Sun enterprise servers, is expected to grow to 500TB in the next few years. The photography company, with $14 billion in sales last year, said it will be using Sun's StorEdge T3 enterprise arrays.
Bob Ansaldi, manager of Kodak's ERP technical architecture organization, said his company's relationship with Sun began in 1996 when it began planning and then helped install one of the "largest SAP systems in the world and acted as an integral part of our infrastructure team."
"They provided scalable and flexible hardware that helped Kodak meet challenging performance goals, while providing significant expertise to assist with sizing, tuning, high availability and capacity planning," Ansaldi said.
Sun said in its statement that the challenge was to design a storage network that could provide Eastman Kodak with the most "scalability, uptime and reliability needed to match the capabilities of Sun's servers running the Solaris 8 Operating Environment."
Denise Shiffman, vice president of marketing at Sun Network Storage, said his company conducted extensive testing and integration "from the database management software all the way down to the device level," to develop the ERP solution.
"This approach is the result of a team effort between Sun and Sun partners to jointly build reference configurations, test and release products, and operate Joint Escalation Centers to resolve technical issues," he said.