Italy's CASPUR Relies on MySQL Enterprise to Support its Scientific Research

MILAN, Italy -- October 23, 2009 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that CASPUR, a non-profit, consortium of Italian universities focused on scientific supercomputing and innovative technologies, has subscribed to Sun's MySQL Enterprise™ database service.

The Rome-based CASPUR (www.caspur.it) consortium has approximately 120 members, counting employees and scientific advisors. It employs a cutting-edge technical infrastructure and specialized applications, making it the most important supercomputing centre in Central-Southern Italy.

CASPUR wanted to provide its users with a system of high-performance and highly reliabile services for accessing biological databases in the sectors of genomics, proteomics, microarrays and next-generation sequencing. The new structure will allow the researchers to have better access to scientific applications and data via an extremely efficient and scalable integrated system – all based on Web services, which also allow remote access.

CASPUR selected MySQL™ because it is a top database choice for the Bioinformatics industry, preferred by both application developers and the computational biology research community, thanks to its simplicity and high-performance. To better manage their use of the open source database, CASPUR employs a MySQL Enterprise subscription that allows them to monitor application reliability -- and improve query performance through the service's MySQL Query Analyzer. The proven solution allows efficient scalability from two to ten master servers, and from ten to 100 back-end slaves, which provide front-end Web services, able to manage the dataflow from a supercomputing system based on a 2048 core cluster system.

"CASPUR relies on MySQL Enterprise because it perfectly matches our supercomputing application," said Nico Sanna, Senior Technology Manager Divisione HPC Chimica e Biologia Computazionale Consorzio CASPUR. "MySQL Enterprise's advanced Query Analyzer allows more effective monitoring and optimization of our database queries."

About Sun's MySQL Database

MySQL is the most popular open source database software in the world. Many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, critical business systems, communications networks, and commercial software. At http://www.mysql.com, Sun provides corporate users with premium subscriptions and services, and actively supports the large MySQL open source developer community.

About Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer™" -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com/.