Sun Introduces World’s First Unified Storage Appliances that Radically Simplify Storage Management and Problem Solving at Breakthrough Speed and Scale

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

SANTA CLARA, CALIF. - Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) today announced the availability of its innovative Unified Storage Systems - the Sun Storage 7000 family, also known as “Amber Road.” Based on industry standard components and Sun’s robust software stack, this new storage family offers breakthrough diagnostics and troubleshooting capabilities, optimized performance, one-fourth the energy consumption, installation and configuration in under five minutes and up to 75% cost savings - all compared to competing storage systems. To learn more, go to www.sun.com/unifiedstorage

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 cloud computing, Web hosting partner 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.

Safe Harbor
This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding the future results and performance of Sun Microsystems, Inc., including statements regarding future appliance and software feature enhancement availability, the anticipated performance and cost benefits of our products and the impact our products will have on the way businesses store and manage data. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and actual results could differ materially from those predicted in any such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause Sun’s actual results to differ materially from those contained in such forward-looking statements include: competition; pricing pressures; the complexity of Sun’s products and the importance of rapidly and successfully developing and introducing new products; Sun’s dependence on significant customers, specific industries and geographies; delays in product development or customer acceptance and implementation of new products and technologies; Sun’s ability to implement a new enterprise resource planning system; a material acquisition, restructuring or other event that results in significant charges; failure to successfully integrate acquired companies; reliance on single-source suppliers; risks associated with Sun’s ability to purchase a sufficient amount of components to meet demand; inventory risks; risks associated with the quality of Sun’s products; risks associated with international customers and operations; Sun’s dependence on channel partners; failure to retain key employees; and risks associated with Sun’s ability to achieve expected cost reductions within expected time frames. Please also refer to Sun’s periodic reports that are filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008 and its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended September 28, 2008. Sun assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update these forward-looking statements.

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