ACADEMIA

SANTA CLARA, CA -- Today, Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) announced it is delivering on the promise of SANs with the new Sun StorEdge Open SAN Architecture. This new comprehensive set of products, enhancements and services allows customers to deploy larger, heterogeneous SANs with higher levels of performance. With this announcement, Sun is expanding its complete storage solution offerings to provide customers with a consistent, unified SAN architecture that scales to meet business needs enterprise-wide. The Sun StorEdge Open SAN Architecture simplifies SAN management, optimizes resource utilization and ultimately lowers TCO across the IT infrastructure. "Knowing that we can build our SAN with any of the Sun StorEdge arrays while maintaining architectural consistency as we look to scale, we now have the confidence to move ahead on SAN projects," said Ron Rose, Chief Technology Officer, priceline.com. "We've been waiting for one of the storage players to step up to the plate and provide a SANs solution to enable the consolidation of resources while optimizing utilization and manageability. Looks like Sun's done it and we look forward to realizing a lower TCO for our storage infrastructure." Increasing a customer's reliability and scalability, this SAN infrastructure consists of a complete 2Gb multi-vendor offering that will also interoperate with 1Gb hardware, thus preserving the customers' investment. The product that deliver this functionality include a new Sun StorEdge 2Gb 16-port switch and support for Brocade's 16-port 2Gb and 12000 64-port director switch and McData's Intrepid 6064 director switch. New single- and dual-port 2Gb PCI HBAs are being announced as well. These additions to the SAN infrastructure reflect Sun's commitment to open systems and support customers' real-world environments which require high levels of interoperability, performance and scalability. In the management software space, Sun continues to execute on its Storage ONE software strategy with new Sun StorEdge Diagnostic Expert software and enhanced versions of the Sun StorEdge Resource Management and Availability Suites. The diagnostic software is unique in its ability to both identify problems real time and provide advice about effective remedial actions. Sun StorEdge Resource Management Suite 6.0 removes management complexity and enables customers to optimize resource utilization by providing central management of all leading open systems environments and heterogeneous SAN solutions for an end-to-end view of the storage resources. New features include predictive trending, enhanced automation and custom reporting. Sun StorEdge Availability Suite 3.1 offers enhancements that significantly improve performance of replicating data from one SAN location to another -- whether geographically dispersed or within the same building while reducing administrative overhead. With these new products and software, Sun is now able to offer open, heterogeneous SANs with fabric support for Linux, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, HP/UX and IBM AIX-based servers, improved SAN performance and support for large, complex SANs. Additionally, Sun's SAN-wide load balancing path manager, Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager, has been ported to these platforms to allow non-Sun servers to obtain the same benefits heretofore only available to Solaris-brand servers. All Sun storage -- from the Sun StorEdge T3 up through the 3900, 6900, and 9900 data center class array -- also offer support for these platforms. "We're listening to our customers and driving the next wave in storage products, software and services," said Mark Canepa, executive vice president, Sun Storage. "Without a doubt, Sun is the only company that offers end-to-end SAN solutions with a unified infrastructure that scales from the workgroup to the high-end data center. As a result of our announcement today, customers finally have the open SAN solution the industry has been promising them all along." Infrastructure consistence and open standards make it easier to design, deploy, manage and support a high-performance, highly available, massively scalable SAN solution. This consistency lowers TCO since customers can start small and scale up on demand with no wasted resources or painful transitions as they move from the workgroup to the high-end data center. The Sun StorEdge Open SAN Architecture is a superior choice for consolidation, data continuance, high-performance computing (HPC) and mission-critical environments. Sun also has the trusted technical services to support the new Sun StorEdge Open SAN Architecture. Sun's global consulting, training, and support organization helps SAN customers achieve higher levels of manageability, scalability, and performance. Visit www.sun.com for further information.