Sun ties up identity management with MySQL

Sun is promising better performance as well as energy savings

Sun Microsystems has announced expanded interoperability between its Identity Management Suite and MySQL open-source database. The firm said the enhancement would help firms lower their total cost of ownership, while improving the database's capabilities.

Sun made the announcement at the MySQL Conference & Expo in California, telling attendees that they now had a much more flexible and scalable system at their disposal.

"Companies continue to struggle with basic identity infrastructure issues and are looking for pragmatic approaches to simplify deployment, and reduce complexity and cost while planning for future business growth," said Mark Herring, vice president, MySQL and Software Infrastructure Marketing at Sun.

"The combination of Sun's open-source and commercial solutions along with MySQL provides the lowest total cost of ownership of any vendor in the market - allowing customers to consolidate their infrastructure, reduce expensive licensing fees, reduce time-to-acquisition and increase time-to-value."

Supporting this new interoperability is the integration of Sun OpenDS Standard Edition with the latest incarnation of MySQLCluster 7, which the firm announced earlier at the show. Taken together, OpenDS and MySQL will give users strong performance, minimal disruption to applications and a simpler programming and administration model, the vendor said.

Sun also announced a new Open Network Systems strategy that it said would help firms to scale up their MySQL-based web services, making it possible to ramp them up to millions of users, while saving on costs. The strategy will also enable enterprises to reduce storage costs by up to 75 per cent, and cabling costs by 90 per cent, according to the firm.

"Sun's Open Network Systems strategy for internet infrastructure solves two of the biggest problems facing customers today - improving efficiency and scaling to meet rapidly changing internet infrastructure to deploy new web services," said Lisa Sieker, vice president of marketing for Sun's Systems Group.

"Our innovative systems design integrates Sun Open Storage with networking and open-source software to help customers increase application performance and achieve cost and energy savings. Add MySQL to that combination and you've got a massively scalable platform to accommodate millions of users, cost-efficiently. "

Sun also announced that it was adding a number of Flash solid state disks to its Systems for MySQL Virtualisation solution. It said that the addition would improve application performance by up to seven times and speed up response times by almost 65 times.