Sun Microsystems Boosts Enterprise Storage Leadership with New High-Performance, Energy Efficient Disk Arrays

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.

SANTA CLARA, CA.-Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced the expansion of its industry-leading disk storage portfolio with two new high-performance disk storage arrays that provide up to three times better price/performance than the competition¹ and enable customers to consolidate workloads within the same data center footprint for greater efficiency. The new Sun Storage 6580 and 6780 modular arrays complement a range of server architectures, including Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 systems running the Solaris Operating System (OS). To take advantage of special offers and promotions for these new storage arrays, please see http://www.sun.com/tradeins/offerings/6x80/

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.