Sun Microsystems’ Breakthrough Sun Fire CoolThreads Servers Market Adoption Continues to Accelerate

Chinese Web Giant Sina Expects to See Five Times Performance Increase Using New Entry-Level Sun Fire T1000 Servers with UltraSPARC T1 Processors and Solaris 1o Operating System.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. April 12, 2006 Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW - News) today announced the general availability of the entry-level model in its breakthrough UltraSPARC T1 processor-based Sun Fire CoolThreads server family: the Sun Fire T1000 server is designed to help customers transition into the next major build-out of the Internet. The new systems complement existing Sun Fire T2000 servers, which have been rapidly adopted by customers and independent software vendors (ISVs.)

One of the largest Web portals in China, Sina first tested UltraSPARC T1 processor-based Sun Fire T1000 systems as part of the Sun early-access program. Sina is preparing for significant growth of its online service business and today announced it will use high-performance, low power-consuming Sun Fire T1000 CoolThreads servers to create a new technology service platform for customers.

“The industry is moving toward the next build-out of the Internet, requiring forward-thinking technologies that support greater transactional throughput, require lower power consumption and which are less of a drain on both the environment and an IT budget,” said David Yen, executive vice president, Scalable Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. “The fast customer and software community adoption rates we’ve seen since launch prove that the industry is ready for highly-threaded CMT systems. Furthermore, the completion of the tape-out for the next-generation UltraSPARC T2 processor just last month further demonstrates that Sun will continue to lead the market for CMT-based servers over the next decade.” Starting at just $2,995, the new Sun Fire T1000 server is a 1U system that ships with Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), the most advanced operating system in the world. The new systems can be purchased via standard configurations or the new Sun Fire T1000 Server Startup Express offering, which includes a pre-installed combination of Sun Studio 11 software, Solaris 10 OS and Sun Java Enterprise System Software. The new Sun Fire T1000 server also joins the Sun Fire T2000 server as part of the Sun “Try and Buy” program, which allows customers to test out systems free for 60 days.

Sun Customers Get Greater Performance: Chinese Web Giant Sina Expects Five Times Performance Increase with New Sun Fire T1000 Servers Running Solaris 10 OS

Sun and Sina today announced the development of Sina’s core business platform, based on Sun Fire T1000 servers servers running Solaris OS, which will help to improve the service quality of China’s largest Web portal significantly. Sina conducted its own set of tests, which demonstrated a five times performance increase in transactional processing and significantly reduced space and power requirements to keep operational costs low. Sina worked with Sun to develop and support fast growth with a robust, reliable, open platform. The Web giant is now exploring how to deploy Sun Fire CoolThreads servers running Solaris 10 OS into other parts of its infrastructure.

Sina Chief Technology Officer Li Songbo added, “Nowadays, online service business is increasing and Sina is committed to improve customer service and cut down operation cost. Through comprehensive and stringent testing and evaluation, we recognize Sun solutions can enhance service expandability, improve customer experience as well as cut down IT investment’s total cost.”

Sun Sees Rising Customer, Market Adoption Numbers for Sun Fire T2000 Servers

Customer adoption rates for the award-winning Sun Fire T2000 server have surpassed expectations to customers in a wide variety of industries and vertical markets. Industry-leading throughput performance; millions of dollars in power, cooling and space savings; a rich software eco-system of ISV partners; and competitive benchmark results are just some of the reasons that customers have adopted these new systems so quickly .

In addition, the recently-announced Sun “Try and Buy” program has given potential customers a way to test and experience the throughput and efficiency of UltraSPARC T1 processor-based systems free, with no obligation. Customer response to the program has been tremendous: Sun surpassed the 1,000th unit shipped mark last quarter with more than 60% of the evaluation units shipped to new customers. Sun is actively expanding this program to include new products and will soon be rolling out the initiative to more countries around the world. Customers can apply online for a “Try and Buy” Sun Fire CoolThreads server at: http://www.sun.com/emrkt/trycoolthreads/index.html

BEA, IBM, Oracle and other industry leading ISVs have already announced changes in pricing policies that pass on the price/performance benefits of multi-core CoolThreads technology to customers. The portfolio of more than 1,250 leading applications currently shipping on Solaris 10 OS can benefit from significant performance advantages when deployed on Sun Fire servers with CoolThreads technology. More than 1,500 ISVs in Sun’s Partner Advantage Program, representing 2,250 applications, are committed to delivering solutions on Solaris 10 and the community continues to expand, delivering customers with application choice and improved price/performance.

High-Performance Sun Fire T2000 Servers Continue to Top All Competitors

1. Sun Fire T2000 Servers (along with a Sun Fire E6900 system) achieved a world record on the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark, besting the previous record holder from Hewlett-Packard (HP) by 10 percent:

* The Sun servers achieved this in approximately 2.3 times less space and with 4.6 times lower power consumption to deliver approximately 5 times superior performance per watt. This resulted in more than 11.5 times higher server efficiency as measured by SWaP (space, watts, and performance) [1].
* Compared with a cluster of six HP DL380 servers, the Sun Fire T2000 Server cluster delivered nearly 2.5 times more performance with 3 times higher performance per watt [2].

2. When running the Oracle 10g database on the iGEN OLTP benchmark, the Sun Fire T2000 Server outperformed an equivalent 4-way Dell PowerEdge 6850 server equipped with the latest 64-bit Intel Xeon processors by more than 3.5 times while consuming 1.6 times less power and occupying 50 percent of the data center space. The price/performance delivered by the Sun solution was nearly 3 times better than Dell. [3]

As one of Germany’s foremost medical and scientific institutions, the University of Ulm demands a huge amount of reliable computing power to drive high-level scientific, chemical, mathematical, engineering, and medical research computations. Recently they purchased three Sun Fire T2000s to add to this infrastructure.

“We are using Sun Fire T2000’s to provide central mail and directory as well as www and file services to 7000+ users at the university.” said Thomas Nau, head of the Communication and Information Center’s Infrastructure Department. “We’ve had them installed in production for 3 months and have experienced great performance without any glitches. We are currently testing another T2000 with which is going to be deployed as a Sun Ray server. Considering the high performance for appropriately selected applications as well as the low power and space consumption of the Sun Fire CoolThreads servers we are definitely looking into working with more of these in the future.”

Sun Maximizes IT Value with New Sun System Packs, Sun Fire T1000 Server Start-Up Express

* To enable customers to derive maximum value and accelerate the return on their investment in Sun Fire T2000 servers, today Sun also announced Sun System Packs, combining servers, storage and software with essential support services at a very affordable price. For example, the Sun Fire T2000, Sun System Packs, which includes SunSpectrum Silver support services, start at a price point that is less than the basic warranty price. The combination of Sun’s world class technology and product innovation with its award-winning Services -- in one simple, predictable, affordable offering -- helps customers simplify complex acquisition decisions, improve business availability and increase operational efficiencies.
* The Sun Fire T1000 server Startup Express Offering includes the thread-rich Sun Fire T1000 server with the combination of Sun Studio 11 software, the Solaris 10 OS environment, and Sun Java Enterprise System Software. This combination provides enterprise developers the opportunity to build new, powerful applications and to enhance existing workloads on an energy and space efficient system that can deliver up to three times the performance using as little as 50% of the energy and a smaller footprint versus comparable systems.

Pricing and Availability

The new Sun Fire T1000 server is available immediately, starting at $2,995. The Sun Fire T1000 Start-Up Express Offering can be accessed at store.sun.com/CMTemplate/
CEServlet?process=SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=148202&PROMO

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

A singular vision -- “The Network Is The Computer” -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world’s most important markets. Sun’s philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, Java, Sun Fire, CoolThreads, The Network is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and in other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

[1] SPECjAppServer2004 7x Sun Fire T2000’s (56 cores, 7 chips) and 1 Sun Fire E6900 (40 cores, 20 chips ) 4098.77 JOPS@Standard. 6X HP DL380 G4 servers (12 cores, 12 chips) and HP rx8620 (16 cores, 16 chips)1664.36 JOPS@Standard. SPEC, SPECjAppServer Reg. TM of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Sun Fire T2000 results published 01/18/06. Other results from www.spec.org as of 04/11/06.

[2] HP DL 380 specifications from web site : http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantdl380/specifications-g4.html HP power taken from DL380 Power Calculator, posted at http://h30099.www3.hp.com/configurator/powercalcs.asp. System configured with Redundant Power, 2 x 3.6GHz Xeon processors, 6 x 1GB DIMMs, 0 x PCI cards and 2 x 73GB HDDs Sun Fire T2000 server power consumption measured while running the benchmark. The SWaP rating measuring Space, Power and Performance efficiency is defined as: Performance / [Space x Power Consumption], where Performance is measured as any specific industry standard benchmark metric, Space is measured in RU and Power Consumption is mesured in Watts while executing the specific workload. More details on SWaP at: http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/swap/

[3] For iGEN-OLTP benchmark results and comparative data on Sun Fire T2000 and Dell PowerEdge 6850 see: http://www.sun.com/2006-0405/t2000/index.jsp

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Sun Microsystems Inc.

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