As Sun hardware belongs to platform families, actual testing can be completed on a subset of hardware and extrapolated to the larger population of hardware in that platform. For example, QA tests a Sun Enterprise™ 6500 server; then these tests can be extrapolated to the Sun Enterprise 4500 server and the Sun Enterprise 3500 server. Different architectures (Sun Enterprise 6500 server versus Sun Fire™ 6800 server) cannot be extrapolated from one another. Using extrapolation, QA tries to cover all Sun platforms of hardware and storage by testing on a subset of products.
Once the QA group qualifies a particular product and it is released, the system is moved into the Solaris OE Train test area for compatibility testing of new Solaris operating environment and third party software releases.