Modern corporations demand a high level of service from their IT environ- ments. Today's successful datacenter architectures consist of multiple tiers that use well-tuned and high-performance servers at every level.

Sun refers to this as the "end-to-end architecture." Typical tiers include powerful database servers connected to many application servers, front-ended by web servers that service a wide variety of desktop, thin-client, and wire- less devices. This architecture is effective for both Online Transaction Pro- cessing and Data Warehousing applications. The end-to-end architecture is appropriate for environments ranging from

large implementations with thousands of processors and hundreds of serv- ers, all the way down to small single-server implementations. Sun is commit- ted to understanding user requirements regardless of the datacenter's size and to making sure that customers can effectively utilize all of the systems in their datacenters. The business of many of Sun's customers depends on mis- sion-critical commercial applications. Sun understands this dependence and treats it very seriously.

Performance is not typically at the top of the three things that keep data- center managers awake at night, but running systems efficiently at high per- formance is an important factor in delivering excellent service levels and doing more with less.