GOVERNMENT

Solaris 10 OS is Backbone of Sun Fire X4500 SAS Database Offering: Sun Microsystems today made several announcements showcasing its momentum in the x64 (x86, 64-bit) industry, including new customers, world-record benchmarks, and offerings for the Sun Fire X4500 data server running on the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). Today's announcements build on the recent server market share numbers released by IDC, in which Sun demonstrated the highest year-to-year revenue market share gain and highest year-to-year revenue growth among the top six vendors in the worldwide x86 server market. "This last fiscal quarter was the 10th straight quarter where Sun had year-over-year growth in our x64 server shipments," said David Simmons, senior product line director for x64 products, Sun Microsystems. "We are continuing to build a relentless pace of technology enhancements and product innovation to keep us on the forefront of this highly competitive server landscape." Wide Range of Customers Deploy Sun's x64 Solutions A large number of organizations have recently deployed Sun's industry standard x64 servers in their datacenters, including Computer Sciences Corp., DigiTar, eHarmony, Joyent, National Stock Exchange, Peerflix, Princeton Plasma Laboratory, Smart Communications and UC San Diego. Customer quotes and more details on customer deployments can be found at: its Web site. Sun Fire X4500 and SAS Create Revolutionary Database Offering Sun supports the availability of the Sun Fire X4500 server paired with the SAS Scalable Performance Data Server, resulting in the ultimate analytic data mart offering. The SAS Scalable Performance Data Server combined with the Sun Fire X4500 server offers incredible performance and integrates data from any source, making it an optimized solution for analytic processing and query and reporting. Ideal for analytics, business intelligence and data integration, this combined offering provides the value of powerful SAS software, high-performance AMD Opteron processors and the world-class performance and reliability of the Solaris 10 OS and Solaris ZFS. For more information, go to: its Web site. Sun Sets Multiple New World Records on Sun Fire Family of Servers In a recent benchmark effort, the Sun Fire X4200 M2 server and two Sun StorageTek 3320 SCSI JBOD storage arrays set a new overall price/performance World Record for the NotesBench R6iNotes messaging benchmark at the cost of only US$2.66 per user. Running IBM Lotus Domino 7.0 server software on Red Hat Enterprise Server Linux 4.0 (64-bit) OS, the Sun Fire X4200 M2 server was able to support 17,000 simulated users with an average response time of less than half a second, demonstrating a frugal yet innovative solution that utilizes x64 architecture and marks the first and only published result on an AMD Opteron-based server. Representing workloads often used in high-energy physics, weather modeling, computational chemistry and mechanical design, the SPEC OMP benchmark consists of medium and large problem sets. On the large problem set, the Sun Fire X4600 server, equipped with four AMD Opteron model 8220 processors and running the Solaris 10 OS and Sun Studio 11 software, is the best performing x86 system on the planet. Sun's server overtakes the result of the competing HP DL585 G2 server, which was running Linux OS, by over 9%. Demonstrating the best-to-date x86 performance, the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server reached a SPECint_rate2006 high-watermark score of 135. The SPEC CPU2006 benchmark exercises a computer's processor, memory architecture, OS and compiler software on compute intensive workloads, such as protein sequencing, fluid dynamics, structural mechanics and MPEG-4 decoding. Additional details on these record-breaking results can be found at: its Web site.