ENGINEERING

SANTA CLARA, CA -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced the availability of the UltraSPARC III Cu 900 MHz CPU for the Sun Fire(TM) 3800, 4800, 4810 and 6800 Midframe server family, injecting new capabilities into the already leading line of servers. With these high-performance, copper-based processors, the Sun Fire Midframe servers topple performance records for SPECjbb2000, achieving 174,658 operations per second, while IBM's fully configured high-end p690 (Regatta) system performance was only 169,794, making the Sun Fire Midframe servers the fastest Application servers in the world. Building on this success Sun also previewed the Messaging Internet Data Center Reference Architecture for Sun Fire Midframe servers, designed to help customers reduce their risk and simplify the deployment of their integrated solutions. With the top two world records for SPECjbb2000, as well as 12 additional world record performance benchmarks, Sun proves that in order to get industry-leading performance, there is no need to compromise availability, investment protection, flexibility and resource management -- all the advantages of the Sun Fire server family. The UltraSPARC III Cu 900 MHz processors running the Solaris(TM) Operating Environment enhance availability through improved data protection, while boosting performance up to 20 percent. With faster application performance, customers have the necessary compute power to meet their application and data center requirements, enabling them to conduct business transactions more efficiently. "Today Sun is continuing to deliver on our singular SPARC/Solaris vision with proven industry-leading systems that offer the strongest investment protection story in the industry," said Clark Masters, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Systems Products, Sun Microsystems. "IBM makes claims about price/performance and market acceptance on a daily basis, without any substantiation to back them up. Sun's industry-leading systems and results speak for themselves. Our unique binary-compatible platform and reference architectures are just two ways that Sun helps lower our customer's total cost of ownership." The new Sun Messaging Internet Data Center Reference Architecture now being tested on Sun Fire Midframes will provide customers with a total solution architecture for Internet Data Center messaging, including server sizing and implementation guidelines, significantly reducing the complexity of decision making and deployment. Following on the success of the currently available ISP Messaging Reference Architecture, running on UltraSPARC II Enterprise systems, the Sun Messaging Internet Data Center is a complete data center deployment with full fail-over redundancy for high-availability. Testing and documentation of the architecture will be complete early 2002, although the architecture is fully deployed and available for customer proof of concept testing. Sun's Reference Architectures are based on tested, tuned and documented deployments by Sun engineers in Sun's iForce(SM) Ready Centers. The server sizing and implementation guides simplify the server selection and deployment processes and reduce customer risk, enabling enterprises to deploy their solutions more quickly and according to their capacity needs, while getting to market with new services even faster. Because all Sun's Reference Architectures are completely deployed in Sun's iForce Ready Center, customers can run proof of concept tests on real workloads before making their purchasing decisions, lowering risk associated with the server selection and implementation. With this assurance, customers can be confident the deployment of their solution, based on Sun's Reference Architectures, will be a success and it will contribute to lower TCO. Unlike any other hardware platform, the Sun Microsystems server family is unique in its end-to-end solution architecture based on the single, scalable SPARC/Solaris platform which delivers a seamless integratable product line from 1 to 106 processors. All of the Sun Fire Midframe and high-end servers share a common Uniboard CPU/Memory board, which allows for hot-swap capabilities. With simplified management, reduced training requirements and lower costs associated with eliminating the need to re-architect applications as the business grows, the Sun binary-compatible platform protects an enterprise's IT investment and ultimately lowers its total cost of ownership. Combined with the speed and efficiency of the Sun Fire Midframe servers running the UltraSPARC III Cu 900 MHz processors, Sun gives customers an “unparalleled” value proposition. For more information visit www.sun.com