INDUSTRY

During its quarterly Network Computing '05 (NC05Q3) launch today, Sun Microsystems announced that industry leaders AMD, Microsoft, MySQL, Oracle and Red Hat are supporting Sun's commitment to industry standards, including the new x64 server family launched today. This line up of industry all-stars represents the broadest set of companies working with Sun toward the goal of interoperability and performance for customers. Working with this range of companies will help ensure that Sun's new industry-standard enterprise Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) server family can be easily and quickly incorporated into customers' existing information technology (IT) infrastructure. As a result, leading industry operating systems and software applications will quickly be certified to run on Sun's new offerings. "Never in Sun's history have AMD, Microsoft, MySQL, Oracle and Red Hat stood behind a new line of products from Sun. Whether it is software solutions to meet the needs of compliance requirements, operating system standardization to control costs or leveraging industry-standard hardware in the midst of an energy crisis, customers can be confident this team is committed to easing the headaches of IT integration," said Jonathan Schwartz, chief operating officer and president, Sun Microsystems. "The combination of performance, energy efficiency and cost advantages of these new systems are an extremely attractive combination for our partners and customers." "We're pleased to see Sun unveil these high-performance standards-based servers," said Oracle president Charles Phillips. "This gives our joint customers and partners a new option to deploy cost-efficient grid computing solutions." As part of the development of these new Sun Fire servers, Sun worked with AMD to maximize the performance of its systems based on AMD Opteron processors. Sun also has designed the new offerings for Microsoft Server 2003 x64 Editions. Sun has worked with MySQL to ensure that MySQL Network, the world's most popular open source database, will run on these new systems. Sun and Oracle have collaborated to ensure that Oracle Database 10g is optimized to run on the new Sun Fire x64 servers. Finally, as part of their newly extended agreement, Sun plans to install and deliver Red Hat's Enterprise Linux for delivery on these systems. The introduction of Sun's enterprise x64 server family and new software, storage, services and industry partnerships further broadens Sun's open, standards-based product portfolio. Sun customers can now choose from leading processors, including UltraSPARC and the AMD Opteron processor, and multiple operating systems, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows Server. Combined with the new Sun N1 System Management software, expanded heterogeneous and remote management services and new desktop computing offerings -- as well as Independent Software Vendor (ISV) support via the newly launched Sun Partner Advantage Program -- Sun is delivering a virtually unmatched platform of choice and flexibility that helps customers cut costs through economies of scale and standardization.