JPMorgan has committed to using Sun's Solaris 10 operating system as the platform for a range of future high-grade technology projects, including grid computing, data archiving and virtualised data centre services.
In New York, London and Hong Kong the financial services firm has been conducting pilots with Sun over the last year, testing a variety of Sun products, including Solaris 10 OS and Sun's new servers. The pilots include utility computing, provisioning and a trading data archive for use by JPMorgan and its clients.
The applications, which are now in testing and development, will utilise Solaris 10 OS on both Sparc and x64 systems. Full ISV portfolio support to port applications to Solaris OS on x86 systems will also be available.
The announcement is being taken as a signal by Sun that its latest range of products have what it takes to meet the price/performance demands of Wall Street's biggest firms.
The company's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz (pictured) has been actively courting Wall Street in a bid to claw back some of the market share lost over the past five years to commodity box discounters like Dell and the open source movement.
"The financial services industry is one of the most demanding on earth," he says. "Performance, reliability and security are not only business imperatives, but competitive differentiators. Working hand-in-hand with JPMorgan is absolutely critical to our success in the marketplace."
JPMorgan has been a Sun customer for over 20 years, and was an early adopter of Sun technology on Wall Street.