APPLICATIONS

Sun Microsystems today announced that more than 40 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), including Oracle, Symantec and BEA, are supporting Sun's high-performance, energy efficient Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers, powered by the massively threaded UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology and the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). This is one of the largest number of ISVs ever to endorse a Sun server at launch. The new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers provide the highest throughput in the industry to enable maximum application performance. With the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology and the Solaris 10 OS, Sun continues to extend binary compatibility across its entire line of UltraSPARC servers. Additionally, with a growing community of over 1250 ISVs representing over 1800 committed applications on the Solaris 10 OS, customers get application choice, investment protection, and a seamless upgrade path. "The biggest names in the industry are lining up with Sun to tackle the new challenges of the next wave of Internet growth -- energy efficiency, space restrictions, performance needs, and cost constraints," said Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems. "With a 5x increase in performance and half the power consumption of competitors at a fraction of the cost, the combination of the new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems and the open source Solaris Operating System presents both the best platform for customers to deploy Internet services and a massive volume opportunity for Sun partners." Working with the extensive Sun Partner Advantage ISV community, these new Sun Fire systems have been tested on an immense number of applications and workloads so customers can immediately take advantage of the performance increases and energy savings offered by Sun's breakthrough Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers. "With these new Sun Fire systems, Sun is not only enabling Oracle's huge user base on UltraSPARC to maximize the performance of their applications and realize the significant cost savings benefits of this new multi-threaded platform, they're also creating a new market opportunity with a high-performance, low-cost deployment alternative for Oracle grid," said Charles Phillips, president, Oracle. Continuing to build on their longstanding collaboration, today Sun and Oracle are also offering customers a special opportunity to try Oracle on the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems. As part of a special promotion, customers using Oracle products with CPU-based licenses on Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems will be able to count cores as .25 percent of a processor versus alternative methods.1 "With an increasing number of devices connecting to networks and users demanding higher levels of performance, customers look to technology leaders like Sun and Symantec to keep their applications and services available and secure," said Niall Wall, vice president of business development and alliances, Symantec. "The new Sun Fire servers offer an innovative new platform that will help us develop software to better meet the performance, security, and availability demands of customers who depend on their IT infrastructure as a competitive differentiator." "Enterprises have always counted on BEA for high-performance software, and the BEA WebLogic on Sun Fire T2000 system benchmarks released today further extends our performance leadership," said Rob Levy, Chief Technology Officer, BEA Systems, Inc. "Multi-core and thread acceleration technologies are at the sweet spot of system design - today's launch underscores this continued trend in the industry. In support of the Sun launch, we've announced WebLogic promotional pricing and the general availability of BEA JRockit -- the industry's fastest JVM -- on Solaris."