As Oracle prepares to acquire Sun Microsystems, it is learning how the company it will buy has been battered by the recession and a hefty cost structure.

On Tuesday, Sun reported its largest drop in third-quarter sales since 2002. The sales falloff underscores the challenges that Oracle will take on when it acquires Sun for $7.4 billion and becomes one of the major players in the market for server computers. Sun’s woes are the result of long-term strategic problems, recession-choked corporate spending and doubts surrounding the future of its products.

“The deceleration in the business was pronounced,” said A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at the investment research firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

For the quarter that ended March 29, Sun posted a net loss of $201 million, or 27 cents a share. That’s a sharp downturn from the loss of $34 million, or 4 cents a share, it reported the same period last year.

Revenue at the company, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., tumbled to $2.6 billion, down 20 percent from $3.27 billion a year ago. The last similar third-quarter decline occurred in 2002, when revenue fell 24 percent, as the former dot-com darling reeled from reduced Internet infrastructure spending.

Excluding charges for restructuring and other items, Sun missed the consensus analyst forecast for its net income by 5 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters. Sun’s revenue also fell well below the consensus forecast of $2.86 billion.

Continue Reading this Article at The New York Times.

In an SEC proxy filing May 12 detailing the background behind Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems for a net compensation of $5.6 billion, Sun explained some of the logic behind the proposed deal, which was unanimously approved by Sun's board of directors but also has elicited ire—and three class action lawsuits—from some angry shareholders.

Fundamentally, Sun, which has lost billions of dollars over the last decade since the high-end workstation and server market went south in 2000 and 2001, believed its only realistic chance of surviving the next few years would be to be acquired by a company with products complementary to its own.

According to the SEC document, Sun talked to three potential buyers. Only Oracle, however, was named in the document. Industry sources have told eWEEK off the record that the two other companies were IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

According to eWEEK sources at the time, and verified by the report in the SEC document, IBM was prepared to make the deal and had even gone as far as getting the cash transfer ready. However, Sun's engagement with IBM focused "on the need to address issues of transaction certainty," the document said.

Due to a number of legal and regulatory uncertainties, IBM was not willing to guarantee the completion of the transaction in the case of federal antitrust litigation. The combination of IBM and Sun products would have given IBM a large share of the high-end data center market and the deal would have been subject to possible antitrust investigation.

Another interesting fact revealed in the filing is that Oracle originally proposed on March 12, 2009, to acquire only Sun's software assets and maintain a minority equity investment in common stock. eWEEK was told several days later that HP had, at one point, been interested in acquiring Sun's hardware assets as part of that deal, but this was not mentioned in the document.

Continue Reading the Timeline of the Sun Sale.

If you believe the Gospel According to Robert J. Cringley, Google pilfered its top-secret modular data center from the Internet Archive.

In a now-famous 2005 online expose, Cringley puts Google co-founder Larry Page at a pitch meeting where the Internet Archive's Bruce Baumgart considers the advantages of stuffing a full-fledged data center into a shipping container. The Archive's "Petabyte Box" presentation is dated November 8, 2003, and on December 30, Google filed for a patent describing its own containerized data center.

Less than four years later, the patent was granted. And according to one former employee, it's now the norm for Google to erect its ultra-hot data centers by piecing together intermodal shipping containers pre-packed with servers and cooling equipment. Inside the Mountain View Chocolate Factory, Page and company call it Project Will Power.

The Internet Archive eventually built the Petabyte Box - though it shrunk the name a bit and stopped short of actually packing its compact contraption into a shipping container. A PetaBox planted at the San Francisco Presido has long hosted the Archive's Wayback Machine - an 150 billion-page web history dating back to 1996.

Internet history in a box

Now, more than five years after first pitching the idea, the outfit that launched the container revolution has finally containerized itself. This morning, deep inside the sun-splashed Santa Clara campus of Sun Microsystems, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle cut the ribbon on a single Sun Modular Datacenter housing the entire Wayback Machine. That's thirteen years of archived web pages packed into a container significantly smaller than your living room.

"At a metaphysical level, what we're doing today is reconceptualizing what a computer is...We're reconceptualizing what a library is," said Kahle, the MIT-trained computer scientist who sold his Alexa web-ranking engine to Amazon before birthing the not-for-profit Internet Archive.

Inside the Wayback Machine with Sun's Greg Papadopoulos and the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle

"You can actually take a tour of this data center and ask 'How big is the web?' You can ask 'How much does it weigh?' These are things you can actually wrap your hands around in a very literal way."

Continue Reading This Article.

Under the terms of the new original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and support agreement, Sun becomes a strategic HP ProLiant OS distribution partner and Solaris is now elevated to the lineup of key operating environments for the HP ProLiant platform. The new deal sets a course for the companies to work together to expand demand for both Solaris and OpenSolaris on both HP ProLiant servers and server blades into new markets.

By providing a single point of purchase, contact and accountability for Solaris on HP ProLiant, HP and Sun are improving the overall customer experience. To further reduce operational costs, the companies will collaborate on integration of Solaris 10 and HP Insight software on HP ProLiant servers to deliver usability and management enhancements.

"We're responding to our customers who have asked for expanded HP ProLiant operating environment support to address their diverse application requirements," said Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager, BladeSystem and Insight Software, HP. "The combination of Solaris and HP ProLiant delivers superior performance, scalability and virtualization capabilities on x86 servers. Backed by industry-leading HP Technology Services, the agreement gives our joint customers complete confidence to grow their businesses while also controlling costs."

"The endorsement of Solaris on HP ProLiant dramatically expands the available market for Solaris on x86 servers, building on the largest installed-base of any commercial UNIX and Linux distribution," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Sun Microsystems. "The growing demand and ecosystem around Solaris helps to further propel its adoption, along with breakthrough technologies like ZFS and DTrace, and outstanding operational economics and market-leading support for thousands of ISVs and applications."

With HP ProLiant leading the x86 server market at 38.2 percent factory revenue share in the fourth quarter of 2008⁽³⁾ and the strong market support for Solaris and its more than 4,300 unique x86 applications, the joint Solaris on HP ProLiant solution has already contributed to a significant number of customer installations. HP ProLiant customers who prefer Solaris on x86 now have access to a complete infrastructure solution for the data center from a single source, making the purchase process easier and more cost-effective. Additionally, customers benefit from the confidence that HP, the largest technology provider in the world, is driving issue resolution for the joint solution through HP Technology Services and Sun is providing software updates through its automated Connected Services offerings.

As a result of this agreement, HP also will increase its participation in the OpenSolaris community, collaborating with other users on feature development and interoperability.

About HP

HP, the world's largest technology company, simplifies the technology experience for consumers and businesses with a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com/.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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.

Sun Offers More Storage to OpenSolaris

Sun Microsystems is turning over object-based storage development for its SAM-QFS file system to the OpenSolaris community in a move away from the OSD standard.

Sun Microsystems is turning over object-based storage (OSD) development for its SAM-QFS file system to the OpenSolaris community, dealing a setback to OSD adoption efforts.

Sun will continue to pursue internal object storage development for the block-based ZFS and object-based Lustre file systems and the ADM hierarchical storage management system (HSM), but Lustre doesn't use the standard ANSI T10 OSD interface.

The move reflects Sun's growing focus on ZFS as part of its open storage efforts.

"Development will continue from the community," said Sun spokesman Alex Plant. "The source code is available for download on the OpenSolaris project pages, where you will find other community-led projects for object storage. With more interest from the community, the QFS Object file system project will continue, as there are other open efforts around object storage."

Block-based SAM-QFS development efforts will continue inside Sun. "Development will continue on the block-based file systems and archive software for enterprise users in our core markets," said Plant.

Sun's shift in strategy also appears to be a departure from the T10 OSD vision.

Plant noted that OSD "is a proposal which provides object storage through, in essence, a more intelligent storage device, such as a disk that supports more advanced T10 commands. Sun's open storage strategy is fundamentally based around a different set of principles, wherein customers can take advantage of a set of inexpensive, simple, commodity technologies to build a physical storage infrastructure, and then intelligence and differentiation is provided through open storage software. The result is that customers experience lower barriers to entry and exit, and the cost of physical storage is minimized."

Plan cited ZFS as an example, which he said offers a complete set of RAID functionality in software using general purpose compute resources, "thereby eliminating the need for proprietary RAID cards that are today less efficient than the RAID provided by ZFS and increase the cost of an overall storage solution for customers.

"ZFS is able to innovate across layers of software in ways that would not be possible if storage intelligence existed only below the device layer," he said. "These principles apply across our Open Storage products, including the Sun Storage 7x10 series, and our core ZFS, Lustre and QFS assets."

Plant noted that while OSD protocol commands could be virtualized and delivered over virtual block protocols like iSCSI, "our sense is that this is an inappropriate model because it corresponds to a hardware device model that we not believe is in the interests of best storage economics. And we believe it is for these reasons that OSD proposals, which date back more than ten years now, have not gained any market adoption."

Slow Uptake for Object Storage

OSD has long been viewed as a significant move beyond the communication, scalability and security limits of block and SCSI technology, but has yet to catch on beyond high-performance storage environments.

Brent Welch, director of architecture at Panasas, which has been a pioneer in both OSD and pNFS development, noted that "introducing new storage standards is a slow process. Even something like iSCSI that was only a slight variation on an existing standard took a long time. OSD is a fairly radical standard by comparison, and we expect widespread adoption to take time."

Panasas has used OSD and pNFS to develop a highly scalable parallel file system. "Sun doesn't have products in this area, and in fact it acquired Lustre (CFS), which is also an object-based file system," said Welch. "However, Lustre doesn't use the standard OSD interface, but an 'object-like' interface of its own design."

Panasas has also invested in open source Linux implementations of OSD targets and initiators, and a freestanding file system called exofs that runs over OSD. "Our goal is to foster more research and experimentation in this standard interface," Welch said.

Indeed, the OpenSolaris community could help spur OSD development — but then Sun would need to include the community code in enterprise editions of SAM-QFS. The SAM-QFS OSD effort could thus prove to be a good test of the flexibility of Sun's open storage vision.

pNFS also includes block, object and file access as part of its back-end protocols. "Things are slowly crystallizing around some new storage interfaces," said Welch. "But storage is so fundamental that we expect these things to take time."

John Lohmeyer of LSI (NYSE: LSI), chair of the T10 INCITS SCSI Storage Interfaces Technical Committee, said that OSD "seems to offer a level of abstraction that should be compelling for some users. However, I think most OS vendors do not have much of an incentive to adopt OSD; they would be delegating an important part of their operating system to other vendors.

"Also, since OSD has been developed mostly in an academic arena, it seems to allow a lot of options," said Lohmeyer. "This can make it difficult to find the common ground for a standard interface. I think OSD will remain mostly of academic interest until some class of users with clout demands this interface and pushes vendors for a specific subset of features."

StorageIO founder and senior analyst Greg Schulz said T10 OSD enjoys "a passionate following in the HPC, academic and extreme computing environments, but it still remains elusive for general purpose and commercial computing environments. ... Given time, somewhere in the future, OSD may finally live up to its expectations, however, for now, object-based storage systems such as those that support access via various application object interfaces, including DICOM for medical, REST, SOAP and XML, among others, continue to gain in commercial adoption due to their ability to support common interfaces with existing underlying technologies."

SAM-QFS was developed by LSC and acquired by Sun in 2001. Sun released the SAM-QFS source code to the OpenSolaris community a year ago. QFS can scale from 1 to 128 nodes and has "virtually has no limit to the amount of information managed," according to a Sun blog posting.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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.

Sun President Jonathan Schwartz announced the long-brewing project, called the Open Media Commons, at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's Aspen Summit on Sunday. The software the company hopes will be employed for digital rights management (DRM) is coming from Sun Labs and is called Dream (DRM everywhere available).

Dream is open-source software governed by Sun's Community Development and Distribution License--the same license it uses to cover its OpenSolaris operating system. Dream's components include software for letting different DRM systems interoperate based on credentials held by individuals, not by particular devices; server software for delivering streaming video; and Java software for managing video streams.

"There are a small number of companies that are presenting themselves as tollgates to the management of digital rights," Schwartz said in an interview. "The Dream DRM solution will bypass the InterTrust and ContentGuard and MPEG LA patents, so that when your child grows up they won't have to pay a buck to watch a home movie."

The lack of DRM standards has been a problem. For example, music downloaded from one company's music store can't always be played on any digital music player.

Sun has been working on DRM since at least 2002, when Chief Executive Scott McNealy first spoke of his aspirations in that area. During that time, some DRM technologies have become dominant. For example, Apple Computer's iTunes music store works tightly with its iPod music player, and Microsoft employs another DRM in its Windows Media Player software.

Sun is nonplussed with the lag, though. "We are nothing if not deliberate," Schwartz said. "We had to get a few of the major pieces in line."

Critical to the success of the initiative will be in the partners Sun can enlist--and the rivals for interest are strong and numerous. Besides Microsoft and Apple, for example, the Coral Consortium includes many consumer electronics giants. And efforts akin to Sun's haven't caught on--for example, a DRM standardization push by RealNetworks and the Digital Media Project.

Sun isn't afraid to step on toes, however. Asked whether Microsoft and Apple might sign up, Schwartz said, "We're interested in companies who would like to see a free and open-source DRM solution in the marketplace. Those who (prefer) a single-vendor or single-device solution don't see the network as we do," he said.

Missing those allies might hamper adoption of Sun's technology, but at the same time it could attract other partners. Hollywood studios and record labels have been notoriously nervous about standardizing on a technology that ties them too closely to Apple or Microsoft.

And Schwartz believes partners will come, as they did when Sun launched the  Liberty Alliance for simplifying the process of logging on to multiple servers. With Liberty, "we clearly brought a tidal wave of support across the industry. You should expect we will do exactly the same here," Schwartz said.

Liberty was initially intended to thwart a Microsoft-centric technology called Passport, but the software behemoth backed off that plan, and now the field is the first area of cooperation in a detente between Microsoft and Sun.

On the heels of that new detente with Microsoft in 2004, Schwartz said he hoped the software company would cooperate in DRM. "I would like to believe we will have cooperation on a single standard," Schwartz said.

Sun also believes it can bypass corporate powers though use of open-source software. "Now it's no longer simply about engaging a few corporate interests. The open-source community is all about engaging the planet," Schwartz said, including individuals who might want to sell their own digital content over peer-to-peer networks.

Corporate allies are part of the plan, though. Here, Sun is turning to one of its traditional allies, the carriers who sell mobile phone service. "They recognize, as do we, that requiring $1 per handset for a DRM license is impractical," Schwartz said.

Sun's technology governs the sharing of digital information, but not how it's encoded with methods such as MP3 for audio. Ultimately, "codecs" for encoding and decoding media should also be part of the alliance, said Glenn Edens, a senior vice president and director at Sun Labs.

"I think a solid open-source community around codecs is equally important to the DRM. We're trying kick off both communities," Edens said.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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.

Customers Can Now Consolidate Sun Crypto-Key Management System and Key Manager Solutions Across Multiple Vendors to Avoid Additional Licensing Fees and More Easily Manage All Encrypted Keys

Governments, finance, healthcare, retail and other vertical markets need to comply with current regulatory laws that create mandates to protect sensitive stored data. To support these requirements, this protocol is available to customers using the Sun StorageTek KMS 2.0 Key Manager and Sun StorageTek T9840D, T10000A, T10000B Enterprise Drives, as well as Sun StorageTek HP LTO4 drives shipped in Sun libraries. A number of additional partners are developing products based on this protocol, including EMC, whose RSA security division has talked about releasing it as an option on their RKM Key Manager.

"Open Storage solutions allows customers to break free from the chains of proprietary hardware and software and this new protocol extends this lifeline into the expensive and highly fragmented encryption market," said Jason Schaffer, senior director, storage product management, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Open source equals customer value for encryption solutions and Sun now offers the only solution on the market that works across multiple vendors and suppliers."

By releasing the Sun protocol as Open Source, Sun is taking a major step towards unifying the technology. Sun continues to work with partners in the industry and with appropriate standards bodies such as IEEE 1619.3 Working Group and OASIS to further develop and formalize the interface as an industry standard. RSA is currently developing a solution using this protocol to work with their RKM key manager. IBM drive division is working on supporting this protocol for their IBM LTO4 drive shipped in Sun Libraries. Additionally, Sun has shared this protocol with numerous other industry partners including computer OEMs, back up application providers, disk array and switch manufacturers.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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.

New Sun Storage 6580 and 6780 Arrays, Deliver Up to Three Times Better Price/Performance than Competing Products and Allow Customers to Economically Scale to Keep Pace with Rapid Data Growth

The Sun Storage 6580 and 6780 Arrays are the best-performing arrays in their class and help enterprise customers seamlessly upgrade their storage infrastructure to scale storage needs within the same power and space envelope. The new Sun Storage 6580 and 6780 arrays are ideal for midrange and high-end enterprise and throughput-intensive workloads that target database and enterprise-email applications and add intuitive, enterprise management tools at no cost through the Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager software. Customers have already started to leverage Sun's industry-leading upgrade and trade-in programs, which uncover hidden equity in a customer's current IT infrastructure by giving trade-up allowances for both Sun and competitor products.

The Sun Storage 6580 and 6780 Arrays help enterprise customers seamlessly upgrade their storage infrastructure to scale storage needs within the same power and space envelope. The Sun StorageTek 6780 modular array performed well against similarly configured competitor on industry benchmarks: (for more information, please see www.storageperformance.org/results)

• Demonstrated nearly four times better response times at 1/4th the latency;
• Over three times better price/performance;
• Showed over two times better performance;
• Delivers 48% more IOPS/drive;
• and notched the best SPC-2 performance of any sub-$250,000 system.

"Today's enterprise storage manager can't afford to cut corners when it comes to managing data growth and requirements to protect storage investments. Customers need storage and archive solutions that take cost out and allow organizations to do more work in the same data center foot print while realizing significant savings in power, cooling and rack space,” said Jason Schaffer, senior director of Systems product management, Sun Microsystems.

New Storage Arrays Bring Value, Investment Protection to the Market:

• Sun Storage 6580 Array - Offers improved response time remains versus previous generations, the best price-performance array in its class and these product specifications: up to 256 disks (256 TB), eight 4Gb FC host ports, 8GB Cache, 16 expansion trays per controller, an intermix of SATA and FC drives and support of RAID 6.
• Sun Storage 6780 Array - Positioned above the Sun Storage 6500 line, the Sun Storage 6780 offers two times the IOPS and four times the throughput performance over the 6500 class of arrays. Product specifications include up to 448 disks (448 TB), eight or 16 4Gb FC host ports, 16GB cache, 28 expansion trays per controller, an intermix of SATA and FC drives and support of RAID 6.

Sun's modular arrays are at the heart of its continued momentum in the disk storage market. Sun recently announced its fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth for total disk storage systems sales with a 25 percent year-over-year (YoY) increase in factory revenue, according the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, 3Q08. Sun shared the top spot for year-over-year revenue growth for external disk systems during the third quarter of 2008 and outperformed the overall market by almost two times.

Pricing and Availability

The Sun Storage 6580 Array controller unit is also available immediately at a list price of $59,995. The Sun Storage 6780 Array controller unit is available immediately at a list price of $89,995. U.S. list price; subject to change without notice.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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.

Opens New Green Datacenter in Broomfield, Colo., Powered by Award-Winning Sun Technology and Revolutionary Datacenter Design, Saves 11,000 Metric Tons of CO2 Per Year; Sun Also Introduces Advanced Datacenter Efficiency Services

The new Broomfield datacenter follows similar Sun projects completed in Blackwater, UK, Santa Clara, Calif. and Bangalore, India in August 2007. It builds on designs used in Sun's Santa Clara datacenter and features water savings, chemical reduction, free air cooling and flywheel uninterruptible power supply (UPS). As in Santa Clara, the Broomfield datacenter is based on Sun's Pod Architecture, which delivers dramatic footprint compression while still providing capacity for future growth. A full complement of Sun's high-performance, energy-efficient SPARC and x64 servers, Open Storage and tape products and the OpenSolaris Operating System are at the heart of the Broomfield datacenter. Specifics products include the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 and M5000 servers, as well as the SunStorageTek SL8500 modular library system, the Sun Fire X4500 storage server and Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems. These systems are part of a major hardware replacement program that led to a 66 percent space compression. In one example, Sun consolidated 63 servers and 30 direct attached storage devices to two Sun servers.

"The Broomfield datacenter showcases revolutionary datacenter design with the latest in modularity, scalability and flexibility to drive incredible efficiencies in cost, electricity and overall carbon savings," said Dave Douglas, senior vice president of cloud computing and chief sustainability officer, Sun Microsystems. "As a company we've achieved our first 20 percent reduction in electricity usage since 2002, and the Broomfield datacenter is a great step forward in meeting our goal of another 20 percent reduction."

Through its own datacenter consolidation efforts around the world, Sun has achieved 60 percent datacenter square footage compression globally, decreasing the company's datacenter operating expenses by 30 percent in the Bay Area alone during the last two years. In October 2008, Sun announced the reduction of its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from U.S. operations by 23 percent, surpassing its goal five years early. The Broomfield datacenter is a major contributing factor in Sun's ability to reach its goal of another 20 percent reduction in GHG emissions.

Features of the new Sun Broomfield datacenter include:

• Greater space efficiency: A scalable, modular datacenter based on the Sun Pod Architecture led to a 66 percent footprint compression, by reducing 496,000 square feet from the former StorageTek campus in Louisville, Colo. to 126,000 square feet;
• Reduced electrical consumption: By 1 million kWh per month, enough to power 1,000 homes in Colorado;
• Reduced raised floor datacenter space: From 165,000 square feet to less than 700 square feet of raised floor datacenter space, representing a $4M cost avoidance;
• Greener, cleaner architecture: Including flywheel UPS that eliminates lead and chemical waste by removing the need for batteries, and a non-chemical water treatment system, saving water and reducing chemical pollution;
• Enhanced scalability: Incorporated 7 MW of capacity that scales up to 40 percent higher without major construction;
• Innovative cooling: The world's first and largest installation of Liebert advanced XD cooling system with dynamic cooling controls capable of supporting rack loads up to 30kW and a chiller system 24 percent more efficient than ASHRAE standards;
• Overall excellence: Recognized with two Ace awards for Project of the Year from the Associated Contractors of Colorado, presented for excellence in design, execution, complexity and environmental application.

Services Partners Support New Datacenter Strategy, Design and Build Out Services

As part of the company's Datacenter Efficiency Initiative, Sun recently announced its Datacenter Strategy, Design and Build Out services. With today's announcement, Sun highlighted its increasingly diverse bench of strategic partners, such as Winter Street Architects, Inc. and TeamQuest Corporation. These partners are collaborating with Sun's datacenter consultants to provide customers with innovative design and infrastructure components. In addition, these service offerings can help customers determine whether to optimize their current datacenters or build new ones, and are based on the same datacenter design methodologies and best practices Sun used in building its own datacenters. The services aim to maximize space utilization, minimize operating costs and accommodate future growth, all critical in today's economy. The new Strategy, Design and Build Out Services complement the Sun Eco Services Suite launched in August 2007. Complete details on Sun's Datacenter Consulting Services can be found at www.sun.com/datacenterdesign

Eco Responsibility at Sun

Sun promotes an actionable path to cut energy bills and reduce IT environmental impact through a three-step approach for assessing, optimizing and virtualizing IT infrastructures. This results in decisive actions that limit computing's impact on the planet and the bottom line of both Sun and its customers. Sun helps enable customers to reduce the GHG emissions and energy consumption of their IT infrastructures with a full portfolio of servers and storage, a complete suite of Eco Services and the Sun Modular Datacenter. Additionally, Sun continues to look for ways to decrease its carbon footprint through programs like OpenEco.org and Sun Open Work practice, Sun's extensive flexible work program and its global datacenter consolidation initiative. For more information on Sun's Eco Responsibility Initiative, visit www.sun.com/eco.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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.

Enhanced Sun Systems Portfolio Sets Five World Records; Doubles Down on Virtualization, Consolidation, Energy Efficiency; Maximizes Choice with Solaris, Linux, Windows, and VMWare

"Sun's AMD Opteron processor-based x64 servers stand out in three areas that matter to customers -- performance, energy efficiency and scalability," said Lisa Sieker, vice president, Systems Marketing, Sun Microsystems. "Sun's innovative systems design with Solaris and the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is a potent combination for complex workloads in HPC, as well as virtualization and consolidation."

Sun's x64 Servers Trump Competition on Industry Standard Benchmarks with Increased Performance, Lower Power Consumption

With better performance and increased energy efficiency, Sun's x64 servers based on the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor have posted five world record results on industry standard benchmarks.

Key systems in Sun's x64 family include:

• Sun Blade X6440 server module - The Sun Blade X6440 is a four-socket server with industry leading memory footprint and high-speed I/O to deliver a compute dense platform balanced for high-volume workloads. The Sun Blade X6440 server module posted a world record 16-thread result on the prominent HPC SPECompM2001 benchmark that is often used to compare the performance of shared memory servers executing compute-intensive scientific applications(1).
• Sun Fire X4600 M2 server - The only compact two-to-eight socket server that can consolidate over 110 x86 servers onto one Sun Fire X4600 M2 server, saving typically over $150,000 per year. With the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, the unique 32-core 4U rackmount server delivers world record integer throughput performance for all x86 systems (2) as well as the best eight processor result on SPECjbb2005, the Java-based Enterprise benchmark(3),
• Sun Fire X4240 server - The two-socket Sun Fire X4240 is designed with more memory slots and storage capacity and higher storage throughput delivering a world record-breaking two CPU result on the SPECweb2005 benchmark with 25 percent better web server performance than the HP ProLiant DL385 G5 and 27 percent better performance than the HP ProLiant DL380 G5 (4).
• Sun Fire X4440 server - A SPECompL2001 world record holder running 16 threads (5), the Sun Fire X4440 server is the industry's only four-socket 2RU x64 server based on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. It also provides the same socket capacity in half the space of competitive servers.

Additional information on Sun servers' record setting performance is available at: http://www.sun.com/x64/amd/benchmarks/

110:1 Consolidation Ratio

Sun's x64 servers with the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor are capable of consolidating systems at more than a 110:1 ratio and supporting up to 100 virtual servers on a single system. The servers are further enhanced with the Solaris Containers capability in the Solaris OS. Solaris offers ultimate scalability and manageability with the AMD Opteron processor spanning from two cores to 32 cores in a single architecture which allows users to standardize and streamline their IT support requirements and scale as their business needs require. Solaris 10 users can also select Solaris ZFS as their root file system and take advantage of a number of key virtualization enhancements enabling them to easily consolidate and maximize datacenter efficiency.

Sun xVM Server provides complementary virtualization solutions for heterogeneous environments. Sun xVM Ops Center software provides a unified management interface for both Sun xVM Server and Solaris Containers. With AMD Virtualization technology (AMD-V), and Sun's xVM infrastructure, the enhanced line of Sun x64 servers simplify and optimize the next-generation datacenter, maximizing consolidation and lowering overhead associated with software virtualization, allowing for increased system utilization, performance and scalability improvements.

More information on Sun's complete line of x64 systems is available at: http://www.sun.com/amd.

"Over the past five years Sun and AMD have worked together to provide customers with a broad choice of energy efficient and high performing x86 servers in 2P, 4P and 8P configurations, " said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Workstation Division, AMD. "The enhanced 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor combined with Sun's x86 server designs can help customers improve consolidation and virtualization, increase ROI and boost performance."

Sun's x64 systems powered by AMD Opteron processors continue to deliver customer value across a range of industries from education to financial services and have been deployed by customers including Citco Technology Management and SAP University Competence Center (UCC). Sun x64 systems customer success stories can be found at http://www.sun.com/customers/.

Sun Services Provide Expertise in Energy Reduction, Virtualization and High Performance Environments

Sun offers a suite of services to maximize the performance of the x64 server line ranging from virtualization and energy reduction consulting to HPC offerings. With Sun virtualization and consolidation services, customers can reduce power and cooling costs by as much as 60 percent and space savings by as much as 57 percent (6). To further reduce power and energy costs, customers can utilize Sun Eco Services Suite, which provides users with technical evaluations needed to optimize datacenter efficiency. Sun also offers HPC services to help customers architect, deploy, and manage their HPC environments for faster time to deployment and with reduced risk. For more information on Sun services visit http://www.sun.com/service.

Availability and Pricing

The Sun Fire x64 based product line pricing starts at $1,900 (USD). For more information on Sun's x64 servers and Sun Blade systems visit www.sun.com/amd.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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.

Customers Report Dramatic Reduction in Installation Speed, Increased Performance and Up to 75% Cost Savings Versus Traditional Storage Systems

The world's first Open Storage appliances, the Sun Storage 7000 family features three products in its initial release: Sun Storage 7110, 7210 and 7410 - each is the first in a new and broad family of Unified Storage Systems. In conjunction with today's launch, Sun also announced a new Open Storage Partner Specialty Program and a series of new professional services to help customers take advantage of Open Storage technologies.

"These new systems radically simplify the way information is managed and can deliver up to 75% cost/performance savings to customers. This is the biggest thing to happen to storage in decades," said John Fowler, executive vice-president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "The new Sun Storage 7000 family offers a new, simple way to use storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems and has the potential to forever change the way businesses and enterprises store and manage rapidly growing amounts of data - their most important asset."

World's First Open Storage Appliances Unveiled

"The Sun Storage 7000 family may well be in a class by itself. The embedded hardware functionality and list of software add-ons are remarkable for the price of this appliance," said John Webster, Principal IT Advisor, Illuminata, Inc. "This new family has the potential to become the most disruptive thing Sun has ever done in Storage."

Sun today released the first three appliances in the Open Storage portfolio, each of which include a fully-integrated software stack with support for a variety of operating environments; ] standard high speed networking and tape connectivity and the industry's most comprehensive management software with powerful analytics tools. These systems are also the only storage systems that fully exploit Flash Hybrid Storage Pools within Solaris ZFS to automatically accelerate and optimize performance while lowering power and cooling requirements.

• Sun Storage 7110: Ultra compact model with two terabytes (TB) of storage;
• Sun Storage 7210: Mid-range storage featuring up to 48 TB of storage capacity in a highly dense four unit form factor; includes support for write-optimized solid state disks (SSDs) that leverage Sun's unique Flash Hybrid Storage Pool technology;
• Sun Storage 7410: Highly configurable storage system with support for up to a half petabyte (PB) of capacity that includes support for read and write optimized SSDs and Sun's unique Flash Hybrid Storage Pool technology; These systems are also available in clustered configurations for added high availability.

Organizations of all sizes and across multiples industries - from enterprises, financial services, and governments to mid-market and Web scale start-ups that deploy high-performance computing, to Web 2.0 build-outs and Internet applications - are all struggling to keep pace with today's rapid data growth and storage management complexity. These customers are demanding new ways to simplify their operations, optimize performance, reduce power consumption and space, and move into the future with easy-to-manage storage systems that deliver better economics and return-on-investment (ROI). Traditional storage products have proven to be expensive, time consuming to install and lack the embedded real-time capabilities to troubleshoot today's complex networked storage issues and cost effectively analyze system performance.

Breaking the industry trend that charges per individual storage features, all Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems include comprehensive data services at no extra cost, such as snap/clone, restore, mirroring, RAID-5, RAID-6, replication, active-active clustering, compression, thin provisioning, CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, HTTP/FTP and WebDAV. Due to the unique design, customers can benefit from continuous innovation when new data services and features are available from Sun through automated updates included in each system.

Customers, Analysts, Partners Believe in Open Storage

i365 (a Seagate company), Digitar and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise, Idaho are among an elite group of early access customers that have benefited from the simplicity, performance and cost savings associated with the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Family. In addition, analysts agree that there is potential for this new product family to be a game-changer in the industry.

Independent software vendor (ISV) partners agree that the Sun Storage Unified Storage Systems is a game-changing technology that presents compelling simplicity and cost-economics to customers. "As a data protection, retention and discovery software and services provider, we believe the Sun 7000 series delivers a very attractive value proposition with very good high availability characteristics and presents a very simple, straightforward management model," said David Allen, CTO of i365 (A Seagate Company). "It represents refreshing and original insights into reducing storage complexity and cuts through layers of fossilized storage technology thinking. In the end result we believe it attacks the most expensive and misunderstood element of storage: the operations costs. We look forward to rolling out the 7000 series in our production environment."

John Newton, CTO and Chairman of Alfresco Software agrees, "This is really exciting news for Alfresco customers. The Open Storage initiative allows our users to manage huge hierarchical stores for content repositories with little effort and provides sophisticated control, administration and recovery in open source from a system that you would expect to cost many times more. This is the path for Alfresco customers to manage terabytes and potentially even petabytes of information."

"IT organizations both large and small across varying industries are struggling with growing amounts of data that need to be stored longer and managed more efficiently. Additionally, they must consider the consequences of the electrical power, cooling, and floor space needed to support existing or additional storage equipment. By combining disk storage and SSDs, customers gain better performance and lower energy consumption at a lower price point," said Gene Ruth, storage analyst at the Burton Group. "We believe SSDs hold potential to yield impressive performance gains in the enterprise and will be closely watching innovations in this space."

Analysis with Unprecedented Real-Time Monitoring

The Amber Road unified storage family features DTrace based analytics, the industry's most comprehensive technology for analysis and optimization of a storage system. Developed by Sun's "FISHworks" advanced engineering team for the past two years, this technology delivers unprecedented real-time observability of an entire storage system in production. Offering radical insight and simplicity, this unique software solution allows customers to rapidly diagnose, troubleshoot and resolve issues before they impact the business. What's more, real time visibility from the CPU to a user helps to ensure performance and health analytics quicker.

"The secret sauce behind the Sun Storage 7000 family is FISHworks, which leverages the DTrace technology within the Solaris OS to enable greater system optimization and real-time graphical business analytics that are painstaking to obtain today, " said Mike Shapiro, Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and lead on the Sun FISHworks project. "We've simplified this process with this comprehensive set of tools that give insight on system performance and potential issues that may arise. There's nothing like this in the industry."

"Over the past two and a half years, the FISHworks team has built and entirely new architecture for integrated storage products that delivers unprecedented analysis capabilities and a new economic model for storage," said Mike Shapiro, Distinguished Engineer and lead on the Sun FISHworks team. "Our systems include the revolutionary DTrace-based analytics, Sun's unique Flash Hybrid Storage Pool and a highly scalable industry-standard architecture underneath."

Open Storage Software, Open Storage Communities Offer Increased Performance, Cost Savings

Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems leverage the Flash Hybrid Storage Pool capabilities within Solaris ZFS and various technologies within Solaris OS and OpenSolaris to create a truly unified appliance. Sun's unique Hybrid Storage Pool technology uses the 128-bit ZFS filesystem to transparently manage DRAM, read-optimized Flash devices and low-cost, low-power disk drives as a single caching hierarchy. The Hybrid Storage Pools deliver greater performance than traditional storage systems at significantly lower power consumption and reduced cost per gigabyte. Hybrid Storage Pools are then used to store data for file and block protocols, like CIFS and NFS, and can deliver a rich set of enterprise data services, including clustering and data replication.

In line with Sun's commitment to be the most open technology company in the world, during the development of the Amber Road family, many new technologies have been shared with open communities, such as OpenSolaris.org. Comprised of nearly 4500 members and more than 50 different storage projects, the Open Storage movement has experienced significant growth over the past year. For more information or to join the community, go to http://www.opensolaris.org/os/storage

New Amber Road Services Make it Simple

Sun today also announced new service offerings for the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage family that provide the expertise for customers to architect, implement, support and manage this innovation in their datacenters to mitigate the risk of downtime, and data loss and speed the time to ROI.

• Implementation Services for the Sun Storage 7000 family provide installation and deployment assistance and expertise that help customers achieve a smooth and successful implementation and optimize the technology in your data center, right from the start.
• Unified Storage Data Migration Services help to minimize disruption and gain full feature functionality of new technology investments. The Services also accelerate greater ROI with Sun's deep technical expertise and proven implementation and migration tools.
• Support services for Sun's Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems include software enhancements and system maintenance. The SunSpectrum Service Plan drives to simplify and reduce the cost of managing an IT infrastructure while delivering proven Return on Investment (ROI) for customers.
• Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System Administration is a unique knowledge transfer system that is designed to minimize disruptions associated with new technology adoption. Assessment Services are available for customers to leverage when planning new stages of development.

Be a Part of the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems Launch, Live from Las Vegas

Sun will also be hosting a live Webcast of the Amber Road launch from Las Vegas on Monday, November 10, 2008 at 3:30 p.m. PST, to join please go to www.sun.com/launch.

For More Information

To see the latest Amber Road videos, datasheets or other launch materials, please go to our online press kit at: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/openstorage/index.jsp

Pricing and Availability

The Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System begins at $10,000 for the Sun Storage 7110. The Sun Storage 7210 starts at $34,995 and the Sun Storage 7410 starts at $57,490 for a single node version (12 TB) and $89,490 for a clustered 12TB configuration. U.S. list price; subject to change without notice.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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.

New Storage Blade Provides Industry-Leading Storage Scalability and Performance; New CMT Blade Sets Four World Records on Enterprise and HPC Benchmarks; Netra ATCA Blade Delivers Higher Levels of Performance for Service Providers

With today's announcement, Sun is expanding its blades portfolio to provide customers with new options. Sun's blades portfolio has delivered four consecutive quarters of triple digit or better revenue growth year-over-year and seven consecutive quarters of quarter-over-quarter unit shipment growth, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, August 2008(1). The outstanding value and performance of Sun's blade portfolio is recognized by a breadth of enterprise customers who have integrated the Sun Blade products into their infrastructures, across industries including government, energy and utilities, education, media, telecommunications, and Web 2.0. New Sun Blade customers include Citco Technology Management, DLR Case, Western Governors University, Last.fm, and SAP University Competence Center. Sun Blade customer success stories can be found at http://www.sun.com/customers/.

"Customers today want performance, efficiency and choice and clearly Sun is delivering. We've nearly tripled our blade server marketshare year-over-year(1)," said Lisa Sieker, vice president, Systems Marketing, Sun Microsystems. "Sun's blades portfolio offers datacenter efficiency at every level and provides the building blocks, x64 and SPARC, for infrastructure that costs less from the start and is easy to grow over the years. And now, with the addition of our first storage blade, we're bringing the Open Storage revolution to the blades market."

New Open Storage Blade Simplifies Storage Deployment and Management

The new Sun Blade 6000 disk module provides a fast and easy way to add additional local storage capacity on the fly, offering customers unsurpassed storage scalability in an existing chassis, instantly providing storage capacity to be used by new applications. As a flash-ready platform, the new disk module is expected to provide even greater application performance in the future by further eliminating storage bottlenecks. Taking advantage of the integrated Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) infrastructure built into Sun Blade Modular Systems, the Sun Blade 6000 disk module is a cost effective and high performance direct-attach storage solution for running Web 2.0 and small database applications on the Sun Blade 6000 system. With JBOD technology in a blade form factor, the Sun Blade 6000 disk module offers two times more SAS storage capacity per server blade than IBM and one-third more than HP. More information on the Sun Blade 6000 disk module is available at http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/6000storage/.

Enhanced Enterprise Blade Portfolio Delivers World Record Performance, Scalability and Flexibility

The Sun Blade T6340 server module, powered by two chip multi-threaded (CMT) UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, leverages Sun's CMT architecture to deliver massive scalability, compute density and energy efficiency in a blade form factor. With up to 768 cores in a standard Sun Blade 6000 or 6048 chassis, the Sun Blade T6340 is fully optimized for highly distributed applications like MySQL, and other multi-tier enterprise applications. With no-cost virtualization capabilities built in via Logical Domains (LDoms) and Solaris Containers, the new Sun Blade T6340 is also an ideal consolidation and virtualization platform for large scale databases, ERP and CRM. Customers can consolidate hundreds of applications on a Sun Blade T6340 to better utilize server capacity while greatly reducing energy, space and cooling requirements. More information on the Sun Blade T6340 server module is available at http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/t6340.

Sun's highly scalable, energy and space efficient CMT servers have set the bar for multi-core/multi-threaded performance with more than 60 world records posted to date. The Sun Blade T6340 server module adds to the tally with four new world records on key enterprise and HPC benchmarks:

• SPECjbb2005 - The Sun Blade T6340 server module excels in the dual-processor category under this Java-based Enterprise benchmark by pairing the most stable Java implementation on the market with the industry's only multi-socket CMT blade platform. Results show that the Sun Blade T6340 server module beats other blade servers from IBM, HP and Dell by over 23 percent and surpasses the best Power6-based two-processor system by 89 percent, making it one of the highest performing and most efficient platforms in the industry for deploying Enterprise Java applications(2).
• SPECompM2001 - The new Sun Blade T6340 server module has achieved world record results for all dual-processor systems on the industry standard SPECompM2001 benchmark beating IBM Power6-based JS22 blade by 32 percent(3).
• SPECint_rate2006, SPECfp_rate2006 - The Sun Blade T6340 server module set world records for all dual-processor systems on compute-intensive SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 benchmarks surpassing the best two-CPU IBM Power 570 result by 31 percent on the integer intensive throughput test and showing up to 1.2 times advantage on the floating point throughput test against the two-socket Itanium-based HP rx2660 server(4). These compute-intensive tests were conducted on the Sun Blade 6000 disk module, further enhancing the local storage performance. Results show the Sun Blade T6340 server module provides a portable, scalable platform for developing and deploying parallel applications and for running compute-intensive workloads, particularly when coupled with the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and Sun Studio 12 software.

The Sun Blade X6240 server module offers industry-leading memory and I/O capacity, making it an excellent option for high performance computing (HPC), as well as for virtualization and consolidation. Capable of running a broad range of IT applications, the Sun Blade X6240 server module leverages AMD's latest quad-core Opteron processors to efficiently execute floating point intensive workloads and enterprise benchmarks, like SPECjbb2005, where the Sun Blade X6240 posted the best result among all two-processor AMD Opteron-equipped systems, demanding the highest memory performance(5). With up to two times the memory of competing blades and industry leading I/O (up to 142 Gb/s), customers can consolidate numerous legacy systems onto Sun Blade X6240 server modules, benefitting from the additional power and cooling savings provided by the shared infrastructure of the blade server platform. More information on the Sun Blade X6240 server module is available at http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/x6240.

Sun Drives New Levels of Datacenter Efficiency For Telco Service Providers

The Sun Netra CP3250 ATCA blade server is Sun's first eight-core, dual-socket Intel Xeon processor blade server and is Sun's highest performing x64 carrier-grade blade server, optimized to run the most demanding, processor-intensive telecommunications applications with 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) support and up to 24GB of memory. The Netra CP3250 blade server is designed for rugged, heavy workload environments while maintaining outstanding performance and energy efficiency. The Netra CP3250 blade server nearly doubles the computing resources of dual-core Intel architecture-based ATCA blades in use today, without power and cooling increases and provides investment protection for existing 32-bit applications. With today's announcement, Sun is expanding the industry's largest carrier-grade server portfolio and offering telco and communications customers new options based on the quad-core Intel Xeon L5408 processors. More information on the Sun Netra CP3250 ATCA blade server is available at http://sun.com/netra/cp3250/.

Sun's complete Netra ATCA blade server line will be on display in booth # 400 at the ATCA Summit in Santa Clara, California, October 21 - 23, 2008. For more information visit http://sun.com/atca.

Services, Availability and Pricing

Sun offers a range of services to help customer maximize their blade infrastructure investments, from migration services to eco to virtualization. More information on Sun's services is available at http://www.sun.com/service.

All products announced today are available now:
The Sun Blade 6000 disk module starts at $1,595 (US List). The Sun Blade T6340 server module starts at $14,955 (US List). The Sun Blade X6240 server module starts at $2,610 (US List) and the Sun Netra CP3250 blade server starts at $6,995 (US List). For more information on Sun's Blades Portfolio visit http://www.sun.com/servers/blades.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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.

Industry-Best Performance on Benchmark Tests Span the Enterprise From CRM to ERP to Java Applications; The SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server Enables Breakthrough Virtualization and Consolidation of Traditional Midrange Applications

Sun also announced the Sun Savings Challenge to give customers a view into how the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server competes with other vendors' servers on key buying criteria including performance, cost, power, space and management. Qualified customers can apply for a free on-site assessment and receive a detailed total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) analysis. Other benefits of the Sun Savings Challenge include whitepapers and technical solution briefs. The Challenge will also be available for the Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 servers. More information on the Sun Savings Challenge is available at http://www.sun.com/SunSavingsChallenge.

Delivering up to four times the performance of competitive quad-socket servers, the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server is an ideal consolidation and virtualization platform for enterprise applications including large scale OLTP databases, CRM and ERP. In a compact 4 RU package, the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server increases server utilization while reducing energy consumption and lowering operating costs. For more information on the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server visit http://www.sun.com/T5440.

Enterprise-Class World Records:

• Two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark - The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server running on the SAP ERP application Release 6.0 and Oracle Database Server 10g on the Solaris 10 OS delivered the highest four-processor result on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark, as of Oct. 13, 2008. The breakthrough score of 7,520 SAP SD Benchmark users posted by the new SPARC Enterprise server (4 processors/32 cores/256 threads) outperforms four processor two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark results achieved on the IBM System p570 Power6 (4,010 SAP SD Benchmark users). When compared with HP Integrity rx6600 running Intel Itanium2 processors (1,750 SAP SD Benchmark users) the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server achieved up to four times the number of SAP SD Benchmark users.(1)
• Siebel CRM 8.0 PSPP - The SPARC Enterprise T5440server has claimed the world record on the Siebel CRM PSPP benchmark, which is designed to stress systems running Siebel CRM software, one of the most widely used CRM applications. The unprecedented result of 14,000 active Siebel benchmark users was set on a single SPARC Enterprise T5440 server with Sun Java System Web server, Siebel CRM Application Servers and Oracle Database software using Solaris Containers. Siebel CRM 8.0 PSPP is a multi-tier benchmark that simulates the real-world requirements of a large organization consisting of thousands of users simultaneously accessing a call center from multiple departments. The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server proves to be the most energy and space efficient server in the industry consuming only 1,276 watts during the benchmark in only four RUs.(2)
• SPECjbb2005 - Pairing the most stable Java technology implementation on the market with the industry's most efficient multi-socket CMT platform propels the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server to the top spot in the four processor category on this Java-based Enterprise benchmark. The Sun HotSpot JVM running on top of Solaris 10 10/08, the forthcoming update to the Solaris 10 OS, sets a new standard for scalability by leveraging the 256 threads of the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors and beats the IBM System p550 result by almost 2x while demonstrating 1.5x better performance per watt.(3)
• SPECjAppServer2004 - The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server running the Solaris 10 OS and Oracle WebLogic Server 10g raises the bar for other single application server results on the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark. Benefiting from the scalability of the CMT architecture, the newest SPARC Enterprise server increases the competitive pressure by beating Java application servers based on the latest IBM Power6, Intel Itanium2 and Intel Xeon processors. In addition, the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server delivered record performance per watt and scored best performance per rack unit for a Java application server. On the database tier of the benchmark, another SPARC Enterprise T5440 server running Oracle Database 11g on Solaris 10, supported this single-node world record SPECjAppServer2004 result.(4)

High Performance Computing (HPC) World Records:

• SPECompL2001, SPECint_rate2006, SPECfp_rate2006 - The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server provides a portable, scalable platform for developing and deploying parallel applications and for running compute-intensive workloads, particularly when coupled with the Solaris 10 OS and Sun Studio 12 software. The new SPARC Enterprise T5440 server has achieved three world record results for all quad-processor systems on the following industry standard benchmarks: SPECompL2001, SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006(5).
  
  Integer performance and the ability to parallelize workloads provide CMT-based systems with a significant advantage on real-world workloads like string searching or pattern matching. These operations often present in a variety of commercial, government and HPC applications ranging from bioinformatics to computer virus detection software. In Sun internal testing, the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server demonstrated up to 27x the throughput of an IBM Cell Broadband Engine DD3 blade and performed string searching 3.3x faster than the HP DL 580 G5 server with four Intel Xeon CPUs. With such vast integer-intensive and memory-intensive searching and matching capabilities the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server could search a book as tall as Mt. Everest (29,035 feet) in mere 68 seconds.

For additional information on Sun's leading CMT benchmarks please visit: http://www.sun.com/coolthreads/benchmarks.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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.

DRESDEN, GERMANY International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), June 18, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced the availability of its newest Sun Blade x64 system, offering industry-leading memory capacity to run the most compute-intensive HPC and enterprise applications. The Sun Blade X6450 Server Module, powered by four high-performance dual-or-quad core Intel Xeon processor 7300 series, enables 50% more memory capacity than competitive blade servers from HP, IBM and Dell, making it an ideal, energy efficient platform for virtualization and applications in vertical industries such as manufacturing, energy and financial services. Running a choice of operating systems, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), Linux, Windows and VMware, the Sun Blade X6450 Server Module gives customers the flexibility to run existing 32-bit applications as they migrate to 64-bit applications. To take advantage of special offers and promotions for the Sun Blade X6450 server, including Sun's Try and Buy program, visit: http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy.

"With the Sun Blade X6450, Sun is continuing to build out its Sun Blade line which offers SPARC, Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron and industry leading operating systems, in a single blade infrastructure," said Michael McNerney, director of Blade Systems, Sun Microsystems. "This new server module takes our blade platform to the next level in performance, packing 768 cores into one rack with increased memory capacity that provides enterprise class four socket computing in a blade form factor."

Sun continues to show strong momentum in the overall blades space. Sun's blade products revenue and shipments showed triple digit year-over-year growth - according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, May 2008 .

The Sun Blade X6450 is the densest four socket blade server on the planet when integrated into the Sun Constellation System - delivering more than seven TFlops of peak performance per fully populated Sun Blade 6048 chassis, up to 71% more compute cores and 50% more memory capacity than competing blade servers.

Availability and Pricing

The Sun Blade X6450 server module powered by dual-or-quad core Intel Xeon processor 7300 series is shipping now with entry-level pricing starting at $8,655. For more information on the Sun Blade X6450 module, please visit: http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/x6450/

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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.

SunDealer.net is a Sun Microsystems reseller.  We specialize in selling Sun Servers, Sun Workstations, Sun Storage, as well as new and aftermarket Sun Components and Parts.  For more information about SunDealer.net, please visit http://www.sundealer.net.

New Sun Fire Servers, Powered by the Solaris 10 OS and Other Industry-Standard Operating Systems, Deliver Market-Leading Performance, Compute Density and Memory in Half the Space

SANTA CLARA, CA May 13, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced the availability of its first Sun Fire and Sun Blade systems powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, bringing new capabilities, increased performance and expanded scalability to customers that purchase or upgrade to these quad-core systems. The Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4240 and Sun Fire X4440 servers, the newest systems to join Sun's extensive x64 (x86, 64-bit) server line, give customers industry-leading energy efficiency, density and scalability powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and a choice of operating systems, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), OpenSolaris operating system, Linux, Windows and VMware. To take advantage of special offers and promotions for these servers, including Sun's Try and Buy program, visit Sun's website.

"Sun's new x64 systems with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors offer customers increased performance, scalability and energy efficiency, and ultimately more value than similar servers on the market," said Lisa Sieker, vice president of marketing, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "In addition to more memory, compute density and disk drives than the competition, our server innovations also enable customers to fully realize the benefits of virtualization and energy efficiency."

Additional systems announced with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors include the Sun Fire X2200 M2, Sun Fire X4100 M2, Sun Fire X4200 M2, Sun Fire X4600 M2 and Sun Blade X8440 servers. Building on Sun's successful line of AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire servers, which have been deployed by more than 12,000 customers at over 31,000 site locations, Sun servers powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors offer unique competitive differentiators over similar servers from HP, Dell and IBM, including:

Storage: The Sun Fire X4140 and Sun Fire X4240, with eight and 16 disk drives, respectively, can function as mini-storage systems ideally suited for scale-out applications such as database, HPC and Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing (BIDW). With their extremely high I/O throughput, they make ideal Open Storage servers for deploying highly scalable storage infrastructures, when combined with ZFS and OpenSolaris. Additionally, all the new systems announced today are already optimized to deliver the next significant boost in applications performance through flash-based disk technologies.
Density: The Sun Fire X4440 and Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers both offer comparable memory as other systems, yet in half the space. The Sun Fire X4440 server is the industry's only 4-socket x64 AMD Opteron server in a 2U form factor.
Memory: The Sun Fire X4600 M2 and Sun Blade X8440 servers are optimized for virtualization, with the highest memory capacity in the industry. The Sun Fire X4440 server also has the highest memory capacity for a 2U, 4-socket server.
Performance: The Sun Fire X4440 server is the best performing AMD Opteron-based system running server-side Java applications. For more information on benchmark results, please visit: http://www.sun.com/x64/benchmarks
"Delivering world-class levels of performance, scalability, and virtualization functionality to the enterprise, Sun Fire systems powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors will help speed the industry to greater adoption of quad-core x64 computing," said Randy Allen, senior vice president, Computing Solutions Group, AMD. "Our long-standing relationship with Sun, combined with the engineering expertise of both companies, enables us to provide industry-leading native quad-core x64 solutions to customers."

Availability and Pricing

The Sun Fire X2200 M2, Sun Fire X4100 M2, Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4200 M2, Sun Fire X4240 and Sun Fire X4440 servers powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are available now. The Sun Fire X4600 M2 and Sun Blade X8440 servers powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are expected to be available by the end of the quarter. For more information on pricing and features, please visit: http://www.sun.com/amd

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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.

SunDealer.net is a Sun Microsystems reseller.  We specialize in selling Sun Servers, Sun Workstations, Sun Storage, as well as new and aftermarket Sun Components and Parts.  For more information about SunDealer.net, please visit http://www.sundealer.net.

New Energy Efficient Servers Outperform and Outscale Competitive x86 Systems Delivering 5x More Performance, 2.5x Better Performance Per Watt in 1/2 the Space; Third Generation Solaris-Powered CMT Servers Provide Ideal Platform for Web Scale, Java and Database Applications

SANTA CLARA, Calif. TOKYO, April 9, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) today expanded the Sun and Fujitsu SPARC Enterprise server line with the introduction of two new systems based on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor. Scaling from the edge of the network to the heart of the enterprise, the third-generation CMT SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers deliver breakthrough performance and scalability and help enable customers to consolidate the datacenter into an ultra-dense, energy efficient compute environment, optimized and managed by the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). The SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers deliver up to 16 times higher compute density than competitive two-socket x86 systems and up to 32 times higher compute density than competitive four-socket x86 systems. The Sun and Fujitsu SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers provide up to three times more performance than competitive RISC systems in half the space.

"The performance and scalability we've designed into these new multi-socket systems with the UltraSPARC T2 Plus and Solaris is jaw dropping," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "In just two-and-a-half years we've increased CMT performance by over 5x without sacrificing space or power efficiency. Customers can now scale more with less whether they're developing Web 2.0 services or running classic CRM or ERP."

"The new SPARC Enterprise servers we are announcing today empower organizations to virtualize their compute infrastructures and build highly scalable, highly efficient and robust Internet infrastructures for the delivery of breakthrough web and enterprise services," said Tatsuo Tomita, corporate senior vice president, Fujitsu Limited. "These SPARC Enterprise servers are faster and provide better price performance than competitive RISC-based servers and offer a compelling migration path from proprietary UNIX systems. The innovative SPARC Enterprise servers and open source Solaris OS - combined with Fujitsu's mission-critical systems business - benefit customers by significantly reducing operational costs with breakthrough compute density and extreme power efficiency. The eco-friendliness of the SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers is an added benefit to our customers in terms of lowering their environmental costs."

SPARC ENTERPRISE T5140 and T5240 SERVERS ENABLE CUSTOMERS TO SCALE MORE WITH LESS

The SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers are the first dual-socket, general purpose servers powered by the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor. The SPARC Enterprise T5240 server beats all x86 systems on enterprise-class applications including Java, ERP, mail and OLTP databases, helping customers to deliver new services and enterprise computing capabilities with higher performance at lower cost. The servers feature up to 128 compute threads in compact one- or two-rack units and two to four times more memory and internal disk capacity than competitive x86 systems, helping customers to consolidate their datacenter infrastructure into a smaller, more powerful, energy efficient environment.

The SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers also offer the industry's only flexible, open source, no-cost virtualization technologies with Solaris Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms). By allowing up to 128 virtual servers per system, customers can deploy 5,120 isolated domains per rack -- making the new systems well suited for server virtualization and consolidation. On-chip, integrated PCI-E and cryptographic acceleration coupled with the high reliability of the server design and Solaris OS helps enable customers to securely and safely run a highly utilized and efficient virtualized infrastructure to support demanding Web scale and enterprise application environments. More information on the SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers is available at: http://sun.com/t5140 and http://sun.com/t5240 and http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/computing/server/sparcenterprise/

The extreme scalability of the SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 systems paves the way for the development of an entirely new class of applications that maximize the performance of multi-core systems. Sun and Fujitsu offer a range of developer tools including CoolTools and Sun Studio 12 software. More information on CoolTools is available at: http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/overview/cooltools.jsp. More information on Sun Studio 12 software and other tools for multi-threaded application development is available at: http://developers.sun.com/devtools/index.html

The new SPARC Enterprise servers are fully supported by Sun and Fujitsu service organizations to help customers build on the advantages of CMT technology. Service offerings include consolidation/virtualization consulting, eco optimization, Solaris 10 OS services, and hardware/OS support. More information on Sun and Fujitsu services is available at: http://www.sun.com/service and http://www.fujitsu.com.

NEW SPARC ENTERPRISE SERVERS DELIVER RECORD PERFORMANCE

Since their introduction in 2005, the SPARC Enterprise CMT-based systems have set more than 50 performance records. Today, the SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers are setting the pace with breakthrough performance and beating the competition in performance, price/performance and power and space utilization on business-critical and compute-intensive workloads spanning the entire enterprise - from the edge to the heart of the datacenter.

Lotus R6 iNotes - The dual-socket SPARC Enterprise T5240 server running the Solaris 10 OS excels on the Lotus iNotes email benchmark with 65,000 users -- the highest ever number of supported users. The SPARC Enterprise T5240 server also delivers better price/performance than competitive systems -- nearly 5x better price/performance than the HP BL480c equipped with Intel Xeon quad-core processors.(1)
SPECjAppServer2004 - Demonstrating its ability to perform business critical operations by supporting thousands of concurrent users accessing Web Services applications, the new UltraSPARC T2 Plus-based server set the single application node world record and beat an IBM Power6-based system delivering up to 3x more performance in 1/2 the space. It also surpasses the Dell Xeon-based system delivering up to 5x more performance and 2.5x better performance per watt in 1/2 the space.(2)
SPECjbb2005 - Pairing the most stable Java implementation on the market with the industry's most efficient multi-socket CMT platform propels the dual processor SPARC Enterprise T5240 server to the top spot in its category in this Java-based B2B Enterprise benchmark. The SPARC Enterprise T5240 server also outperforms all four-socket x86 systems from HP, as well as beats the AMD Opteron-based Dell PowerEdge 6950 server by over 2x in half the space, while delivering 3x better performance per watt.(3)
SAP Sales and Distribution Standard Application Benchmark - Demonstrating its ability to handle critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments, the SPARC Enterprise T5120 server with a single UltraSPARC T2 processor (8 cores, 64 threads) and the SPARC Enterprise T5240 server with two UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors (16 cores, 128 threads) now hold world records for all single and dual processor systems on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark. The SPARC Enterprise T5240 server supported 4,170 SAP SD Benchmark users - a result more than double the 2,035 SAP SD Benchmark users achieved by the IBM p570 system with two POWER6 processors.(4)
SPECweb2005 - At the edge of the datacenter where Web services play a critical role, the UltraSPARC T2-based SPARC Enterprise T5220 server is #1 -- beating all other results on this industry standard Web server performance benchmark.(5)
For additional details and a complete list of all CMT benchmarks, please visit http://www.sun.com/coolthreads/benchmarks and http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/computing/server/sparcenterprise/

SOLARIS 8 AND 9 CONTAINERS FOR THE SOLARIS 10 OS

Also announced today are new offerings providing virtualization services to run Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 applications and help enable the simple transfer of applications to the latest CMT systems running the Solaris 10 OS. With these new products, Solaris 8 and 9 Containers for the Solaris 10 OS, multiple Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 environments, or a combination of the two, can be hosted on a single SPARC-based system. As a result, customers can streamline IT operations, maximize datacenter space, and save on power, cooling and support costs. The move to the latest hardware is now de-coupled from the need to move directly to the Solaris 10 OS, allowing customers to take advantage today of the performance, scale and cost savings of new SPARC Enterprise CMT-based servers.

Both Fujitsu-branded and Sun-branded SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers will be marketed worldwide. All other features are identical.

About Fujitsu

Fujitsu is a leading provider of customer-focused IT and communications solutions for the global marketplace. Pace-setting device technologies, highly reliable computing and communications products, and a worldwide corps of systems and services experts uniquely position Fujitsu to deliver comprehensive solutions that create infinite possibilities for its customers' success. Headquartered in Tokyo, Fujitsu Limited (TSE: 6702) reported consolidated revenues of 5.1 trillion yen (US$43.2 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2007. For more information, please see: http://www.fujitsu.com/.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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.

SunDealer.net is a Sun Microsystems reseller.  We specialize in selling Sun Servers, Sun Workstations, Sun Storage, as well as new and aftermarket Sun Components and Parts.  For more information about SunDealer.net, please visit http://www.sundealer.net.

Sun Netra T5220 Server with the UltraSPARC T2 Processor Delivers 64 Virtual Systems in a 2U Server

BARCELONA MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS, February 12, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today introduced the Sun Netra T5220 server, the industry's first carrier-grade, 64-thread rackmount server. The Sun Netra T5220 server is the industry's only Network Equipment Building Standard (NEBS) Level 3 Certified Rack Server based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor. Powered by the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), the most secure carrier-grade OS for the telecommunications industry, it delivers multithreaded world-record performance in a space-efficient, 20-inch-deep package.

Also at Mobile World Congress:

In its booth at the show (#2C12, Hall 2), Sun is demonstrating future Netra rackmount and blade servers that will be powered by Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, delivering on its commitment to offer an entire line of carrier-grade telco servers based on energy-efficient Intel Xeon processor technology.
Sun announced that Bridgewater Systems and OpenClovis have joined the Sun Unified Network Platform (SUN-P) partner eco-system. SUN-P is an OEM solution set that enables radical consolidation of the network, significantly lowering the cost of wireless deployments such as WiMAX or Long Term Evolution (LTE). To see an interactive ROI tool showing the benefits of SUN-P in the development for WiMAX and LTE networks,please visit: http://sun.com/wimax.
"The Sun Netra T5220 server is yet another example of Sun's innovative systems design. Take a look at the market today, and no one else is offering 64 virtual servers in a single 2U box," said Mark Butler, Netra systems product line director, Sun Microsystems. "We're also extremely excited about the Intel Xeon-based Netra servers we are demonstrating at the show. When these servers are available next quarter, Sun will have the broadest line-up of telco servers in the industry, giving customers a choice of every major processor architecture and operating system in both ATCA blade and carrier-grade rackmount versions."

As the first carrier-grade, 64-thread rackmount server in the market, the Sun Netra T5220 server is an ideal platform for virtualization and consolidation, offering 64 virtual systems in a 2U, 20-inch-deep form factor. Other features include:

Integrated no-cost virtualization technologies with a choice of Solaris Containers and Sun Logical Domains (LDoms)
Integrated on-chip cryptographic acceleration and 10 Gigabit Ethernet computing
Expandability and I/O performance from six PCI slots and four Ethernet interfaces
Enhanced system uptime with high on-chip RAS, redundant power supplies, hot-pluggable disk drives and support for hardware RAID
Customers, ISVs and Partners Demonstrate Support for the Sun Netra T5220 Server and SUN-P Partner Ecosystem

"Alcatel-Lucent has been validating the Sun Netra T5220 server in our laboratory for several weeks now," said Alain Barlier, OAM Senior Architect, Alcatel-Lucent. "While we are still in the platform verification phase, the Netra T5220 server based on the advanced technology of the UltraSPARC T2 CMT processor and PCI Express I/O has exceeded our performance expectations."

AppGate Network Security and Zeus Technology have both signed on to develop applications for the Sun Netra T5220 server. For more information on customer and ISV support of the Sun Netra T5220 server, please visit: http://www.sun.com/netra/t5220/perspectives.xml

Bridgewater Systems has recently joined the SUN-P partner ecosystem. For more information about SUN-P partners, please visit: http://www.sun.com/servers/netra/wimax/offerings.jsp

"As part of the Sun Unified Network Platform partner ecosystem, Bridgewater Systems offers proven carrier-grade policy management solutions for mixed-network deployments," said Tyler Nelson, Vice President, Business Development and Marketing, Bridgewater Systems. "Because these solutions provide simultaneous support across all networks - WiMAX, LTE, 3G and wireline - using a common policy management infrastructure and subscriber repository, Service Providers can accelerate time to market for new services. The combination of Bridgewater Systems software with SUN-P, based on Sun's latest UltraSPARC T2-based carrier-grade Netra ATCA and rackmount servers, offers a powerful and scalable platform for WiMAX/LTE networks."

Availability and Pricing

The Sun Netra T5220 server powered by UltraSPARC T2 processors is available now with entry-level pricing starting at $14,995. For more information on the Sun Netra T5220 server, please visit: http://www.sun.com/netra/t5220

The Sun Netra T5220 server is part of a complete carrier-grade solution from Sun. For more information on NEBS-certified storage, including the Sun StorageTek 2510 array, Sun StorageTek 2530 array, Sun StorageTek 2540 array and Sun StorageTek 6140 array, please visit: http://www.sun.com/storage. For more information on Sun's virtualization offerings, please visit: http://www.sun.com/datacenter/consolidation/index.jsp. For more information on Sun's services, please visit: http://www.sun.com/services

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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.

SunDealer.net is a Sun Microsystems reseller.  We specialize in selling Sun Servers, Sun Workstations, Sun Storage, as well as new and aftermarket Sun Components and Parts.  For more information about SunDealer.net, please visit http://www.sundealer.net.

Innovative Design Delivers High Performance, Eco-Efficient Servers With Virtualization Built-in; New Systems on Solaris Deliver Higher Performance in 1/4 the Space at Nearly 1/4 the Cost of Competitive RISC Systems, Enable Customers to Meet Peak Web Scale Demand

LAS VEGAS, Nev. October 9, 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) today expanded the Sun and Fujitsu SPARC Enterprise server line with the introduction of the SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers - the first servers using the new UltraSPARC T2 processor. The new SPARC Enterprise servers run the Solaris Operating System (OS) and are ideal platforms for customers needing to achieve increased scale, density and performance, particularly in the web and application tiers and for online transaction processing (OLTP) and technical workloads. Built-in, no-cost virtualization capabilities in the servers also enable IT staff to easily maximize system utilization, helping to lower the cost of delivering new IT services.

"Our new SPARC Enterprise systems based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor are completely changing the economics of application deployment. Our customers will benefit from lower acquisition and operational costs and can receive a better return on assets when using our new SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems.

"Our relationship with Sun continues to be of great value to customers," said Tatsuo Tomita, corporate senior vice president, Fujitsu Limited. "The innovative SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers and Solaris OS -- combined with Fujitsu's mission-critical systems business -- benefit customers by providing a very fast, low-cost and secure solution that can run the thousands of commercial and open source applications that are important to our customers. The 'eco-friendliness' of the SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 is an extra benefit to our customers in terms of lowering their environmental costs."

INCREASED WEB SCALE CAPABILITIES

SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers double the number of processing threads and increase floating point capabilities 8 times over the previous generation, and are the first servers to integrate 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology and I/O directly on the chip. Ready for the emerging generation of network-intensive services, the SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 are capable of web serving over four times the number of users, in 1/4 the space at nearly 1/4 the cost, while maintaining over 6x better performance per watt compared to competitive UNIX/RISC-based servers.

BUILT-IN, NO-COST VIRTUALIZATION

By combining 64 processor threads per UltraSPARC T2 processor and open source, no-cost virtualization technology such as Solaris Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms), the SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers enable IT staff to achieve high levels of system utilization. IT staff can securely deploy many applications on a single SPARC Enterprise T5120 or T5220 server. Consolidating many applications on individual servers results in better resource utilization which means lower acquisition cost, lower administration cost and improved flexibility in meeting constantly changing IT requirements. The SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers offer more virtualization flexibility than any other server in its class, with up to 64 isolated domains per socket, and without the premium charged for proprietary virtualization solutions.

ADVANCED RELIABILITY AND SECURITY FEATURES

The new SPARC Enterprise servers have advanced reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features that allow the ability to turn off bad threads, detect multiple memory errors and reallocate bad memory blocks. The implementation of common Integrated Lights Out Management (ILOM) tools enable the SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers to be integrated and managed within industry-standard Enterprise Management Frameworks and Element Managers, resulting in decreased installation time, improved time to market, increased agility and reduced management overhead for on-going maintenance and patching. Integrating key server features such as networking, interconnect and cryptography not only helps improve performance but also reduces server component counts, which increases reliability. Native on-chip support for 10 of the most common cryptographic ciphers allows the SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers to deliver, with minimal overhead per processor, 20 times more cryptographic operations per second than competitive x86 processors and 17 times more operations per second than dedicated cryptographic accelerator cards.

SPARC ENTERPRISE T5120 and T5220 SERVERS RAISE THE BAR, OUTCLASS THE COMPETITION

The new SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers are outperforming the competition with the following world record benchmarks:

SPECweb2005: best secure web serving performance, outperforming the HP Proliant DL380G5 server by 1.8x and demonstrating 2.3x better performance per watt than the HP DL585G2 server (1)
Lotus R6 iNotes: breakthrough single-socket mail server performance with exceptional price/performance per user, outpacing IBM x3650 by 2x while delivering 2.1x better performance per watt (3)
Additonal performance details available at www.sun.com/coolthreads/benchmarks

AVAILABILITY

SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers are available immediately with pricing starting at $13,995 USD (US list).

Both Fujitsu branded and Sun branded SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers will be marketed worldwide. All other features are identical.

For more information, visit www.sun.com or www.fujitsu.com

About Fujitsu

Fujitsu is a leading provider of customer-focused IT and communications solutions for the global marketplace. Pace -setting device technologies, highly reliable computing and communications products, and a worldwide corps of systems and service experts uniquely position Fujitsu to deliver comprehensive solutions that open up infinite possibilities for its customers' success. Headquartered in Tokyo, Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 5.1 trillion yen (US$43.2 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2007. See http://www.fujitsu.com/global/ for further information.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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.

SunDealer.net is a Sun Microsystems reseller.  We specialize in selling Sun Servers, Sun Workstations, Sun Storage, as well as new and aftermarket Sun Components and Parts.  For more information about SunDealer.net, please visit http://www.sundealer.net.