Sun Expands Sun Streaming System To Deliver Industry’s Most Scalable And Flexible Video Delivery Over IP Platform

Open Software Platform Leveraging Solaris Enables 100-160,000 Streams from a Single System
LAS VEGAS NAB 2008.- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it is expanding its Sun Streaming System product portfolio, creating the only IPTV platform that can scale seamlessly and cost-effectively from 100 to 160,000 simultaneous streams. Joining the industry’s highest performance Sun Fire X4950 Streaming Switch are new server and storage platforms for small to mid-scale streaming of television and IP-based video. Sun also announced Sun Streaming Software Release 2, which leverages the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), enabling customers to scale economically from 500 to more than 1.5 million subscribers, and from 200 to over 1 million hours of content.

With these new platforms the Sun Streaming System now offers the industry’s broadest scalability and flexibility to service providers building out new video delivery networks. Customers can now configure and grow very diverse deployments and service offerings with a single software framework running on the right-sized servers, storage and networking from 1U to 14U. This not only simplifies deployment planning and network management, but also prevents service disruptions as deployments grow.

“The Sun Streaming System is the only streaming product family on the market today to offer customers both disruptive economics and non-disruptive growth at nearly any scale point - giving customers the ability to evolve their networks and services without the pain of major retrofits or integrations,” said Graham Lovell, senior director, storage servers and IPTV, Sun Microsystems. “Sun’s innovation makes us uniquely positioned to serve the needs of IPTV service providers and bring consumers the latest video technologies such as personalized video and social networking.”

The Sun Streaming System includes the 1U Sun Fire X4150 server powered by Quad-Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) processors, the 4U Sun Fire X4600 M2 server powered by AMD Opteron processors, and the Sun StorageTek 2530 Array. Later in 2008, the Sun Streaming Software will also support carrier-grade Netra x64 servers, Netra ATCA x64 blade servers, and options to include flash-based storage from Sun -- enabling customers to deploy extremely high reliability and performance caching in remote and lights-out environments. These new server and storage options offer service providers the maximum flexibility to independently scale streaming capacity, content capacity, ingest rates and degree of user interactivity as the needs of the subscribers evolve.

Sun’s IPTV Platform Drives Breakthrough Economics for Customers and Partners

Partners and customers continue to validate the breakthrough economics of the Sun Streaming System. Customers deploying the Sun Streaming System today include Media Partners International (MPI), the major provider of video streaming services in Bangkok, and Building B, a U.S.-based entertainment technology and services company. Building B is working with Sun and Harris Corporation to deploy its next-generation video services to service providers using the new Sun Streaming Software Release 2 running on the Sun Fire X4600 M2 and Sun Fire X4150 servers - a solution that offers the lowest cost and power consumption and highest streaming capacity on the smallest hardware configuration possible.

“Building B has created a platform that is at the forefront of next-generation television, bringing together the best TV, movies and the Internet to deliver a comprehensive and modern home entertainment experience. Our network operations requires a flexible, yet small footprint solution that delivers high streaming performance at any scale,” said Phil Wiser, Building B president and co-founder. “The Sun Streaming System and its new expanded product family provides a reliable, flexible and scalable architecture allowing Building B to cost-effectively deliver a highly advanced and personal television service to consumers.”

“The Sun Streaming System is ideally suited for the video streaming services that we are planning in greater Bangkok. It is the only video streaming product platform on the market that offers customers maximum flexibility and ease of integration with Open Standards-based APIs to deliver personalized video services,” said Jintavee Sawadisevee, CTO at Media Partners International Co. LTD. “It also is the only product family today that has unmatched cost-effective streaming scalability from the low end, to configurations with hundreds of thousands of concurrent video streams.”

In addition to the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and Independent Hardware Vendor (IHV) solutions that were announced in April 2007, Sun continues to collaborate with a number of resellers, partners and ISVs, including Nortel Networks, EDS and TechMahindra, to offer end-to-end Video Delivery Solutions based on the Sun Streaming System. In addition, Sun and Harris have extended their relationship, combining Harris’ video technologies and scheduling software with the Sun Streaming System to deliver next-generation video services to entertainment and government customers. The Sun Streaming System has also been integrated with the OpenStream Digital Services Platform from TANDBERG Television, part of the Ericsson Group, to provide quick and easy deployment of end-to-end video delivery solutions to service providers worldwide.