Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz Previews Sun xVM and Unveils Partner Ecosystem at Oracle OpenWorld

Industry’s First Free, Open Source Datacenter Virtualization and Management Platform.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.- Today during his keynote address at Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: Java) President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz will unveil Sun xVM, the company’s open, comprehensive virtualization and management platform. The introduction of Sun xVM marks a new era in IT productivity, building on years of virtualization innovations in the Java platform, in the free and open source Solaris Operating System (OS), and in the commodity UltraSparc microprocessor. During his keynote, Schwartz will also highlight Sun’s cutting-edge Eco technologies that help increase IT energy efficiency and drive user cost savings.

“The world clearly recognizes that the move to free and open source software has led to savings, efficiency and competition. Virtualization presents an equivalently compelling opportunity - but it’s a move not without risk,” said Schwartz. “Customers tell us the last thing they want is a proprietary vendor at the core of their next generation datacenter architectures, which is why Sun is pleased to commit nearly $2 billion in R&D to the success of its xVM program, a free and open software platform and comprehensive management offering to virtualize and manage mixed environments running platform software from the Java, OpenSolaris and Linux software communities, along with Microsoft Windows, across HP, Dell, IBM and Sun hardware. Sun xVM moves beyond server consolidation, recognizing that virtualization must encompass all datacenter assets, from the network and storage, to applications and hardware provisioning - while eliminating the risk of proprietary dependency.”

During the keynote, Sun will also demonstrate two upcoming products at the core of Sun’s virtualization offerings: Sun xVM Ops Center, a unified management infrastructure, and Sun xVM Server, an enterprise-grade bare-metal hypervisor. Sun xVM will combine enhancements to Sun’s existing technology portfolio with new offerings that will help customers to increase efficiency, while simplifying management and saving money. Additionally, Sun will launch www.openxvm.org, an open source community for developers building next-generation datacenter virtualization and management technologies.

Sun will also announce that key industry partners are supporting the company’s goal to deliver the industry’s first, interoperable, virtualization and management platform built on open source technologies. AMD, Intel, MySQL, Quest Software, Red Hat and Symantec are a few of the many hardware, software, operating system and management companies endorsing Sun’s vision for the future of virtualization.

“Virtualization extends the tradition of information technology enabling customers to do more with less, and its profound benefits are truly revolutionizing the industry,” said Hector Ruiz, Chairman and CEO, AMD. “Sun’s introduction of its open xVM Infrastructure expands enterprise access to virtualization technology and its accompanying benefits, including helping contain ballooning energy costs through consolidation. With Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors specifically designed to optimize virtualization performance, and Sun xVM products based on Solaris OS, AMD and Sun will push the envelope for what is possible with virtualization in the enterprise.”

“Virtualization is gaining momentum and bringing real value to the enterprise,” said Kirk Skaugen, Vice President Server Platforms Group, Intel. “Intel supports virtualization solutions from leading suppliers including Sun. Sun and Intel are working together to take advantage of Intel Virtualization Technology in the new Intel Xeon processors. We expect this collaboration on Sun xVM Server to accelerate the value of virtualization solutions across the enterprise.”

“We are thrilled to see Sun bring a world-class open source virtualization solution to market; a true testament of Sun’s continued commitment to the open source community,” said Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB. “We’re always pleased to offer our customers more open source options. Now, they can deploy the MySQL database and Sun’s xVM virtualization platform to drive further productivity and cost efficiencies across the enterprise.”

“Virtualization is one of the most important areas for Quest moving forward, and we are delighted to partner with Sun in its effort to have Sun xVM address the increasing market demand for a simplified, reliable and open virtualization and management platform,” said Mike Ragusa, vice president, Channels and Alliances, Quest Software. “Together we’re working to ensure that Quest’s expanding line of systems management products and tools will support Sun’s xVM product portfolio to help organizations get even more performance and productivity out of their enterprise applications and databases.”

Red Hat and Sun are collaborating to expand interoperability and customer choice. Customers seeking a free and open source virtualization platform that ensures interoperability and avoids proprietary vendor lock in, can look to Sun and Red Hat solutions. Sun supports Red Hat’s Linux Automation strategy and Red Hat supports Sun’s xVM strategy, both of which extend the reach and value of open source. Red Hat and Sun will ensure customers mutual certification and customer support across our virtualization offerings. In addition, Sun and Red Hat are committed to working together to foster libvirt (www.libvirt.org), an open source community for cross-platform virtualization management, to enable Sun, Red Hat and 3rd party management tools to seamlessly interoperate across each company’s virtualization platforms.

“Red Hat and Sun are collaborating to certify and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a guest on Sun xVM and to certify and support Solaris as a guest on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based appliances will run on Sun xVM,” said Paul Cormier, Red Hat EVP of Engineering. “We appreciate Sun’s support of our Linux Automation strategy, through which we will be able to deliver infrastructure with quality, performance and value that is unmatched by proprietary software. Red Hat and Sun will provide joint seamless end-to-end customer support to provide more opportunity for customers and partners, across both of our virtualization platforms.”

“Symantec is committed to helping customers manage, protect and optimize their virtualized environments by providing support for heterogeneous virtual machines across a broad range of platforms,” said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president, Server Management, Symantec. “We have a long standing relationship with Sun and look forward to continuing to work with them to support their new virtualization initiative and deliver compelling solutions to our joint customers.”

Sun xVM Family of Products

Sun’s end-to-end approach to datacenter virtualization - spanning desktops to servers to storage and the network - will let customers deploy new services faster, maximize system resources and more easily monitor and manage virtualized environments. As part of Sun’s commitment to interoperability, Sun xVM will run on multi-vendor x86/64 and SPARC processor-based systems from leading hardware vendors including Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Sun.

Sun xVM Ops Center and Sun xVM Server will be the first of the xVM family of products introduced to the market. Sun xVM Ops Center will deliver a unified management console that will help users to manage both the virtualized and physical components of their IT environment. Sun xVM Server, Sun’s virtualization server, will include code derived from work of the Xen open source community. Sun xVM Server will help extend the benefits of technologies like Predictive Self-Healing software and ZFS to Windows and Linux guest operating system instances, previously only available to Solaris OS users.

For more information about Sun’s virtualization offerings, Sun xVM, please visit www.sun.com/xvm