OIL & GAS

Sun Microsystems closed out CY2004 with strong customer momentum in the high performance and technical computing (HPTC) market and solidified itself as the number one vendor in unit market share for the fifth consecutive quarter according to the latest research from IDC. Sun's range of servers powered by AMD Opteron processors fueled Sun's growth in overall unit market share on a year-over-year (Y/Y) basis as the company exited 2004 more than 15 share points ahead of its nearest competitor. Evidence of Sun's success includes its continued penetration of key vertical industries, such as government, financial services and education, as it continues to drive grid computing into the mainstream of HPTC data centers. The company's strong performance is the result of its investment in the Solaris 10 operating system, the continued expansion of its Sun Fire x64 product range, and providing its customers with options to include Linux distributions in their HPTC data centers. As the HPTC market continues to shift to clusters of smaller, more powerful servers, Sun is well-positioned to deliver the types of solutions to meet the needs of customers in a wide variety of industries. Deployments of Sun's Grid technology announced in 2004 spanned industries ranging from government to financial services to education. Notable wins included the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), the Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Leicester, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, University of Nottingham, and several others. Sun and INL teamed on a solution that includes more than 230 Sun Fire V20z servers powered by AMD Opteron processors, and more than 12 Terabytes of Sun StorEdge 6320 storage, the Solaris 10 operating system, Sun Java Enterprise System and Java development software, Sun Grid Engine Enterprise Edition, Sun's StarOffice 7.0 office productivity platform, as well as advanced on-site training and support from Sun's Services division. The cluster's full-throttle computing power ranks the INL datacenter as one of the world's top supercomputing sites. "With its emphasis on maximizing data center utilization and value, grid computing continues to move into the mainstream," said Peter Ffoulkes, group director, high performance and technical computing marketing, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Overall, the HPTC market is beginning to pick up after a couple of slow growth years and the recent investments we've made to broaden our product line are paying off. We are confident that we are uniquely positioned to address customer pain-points in all market segments with our servers based on SPARC and AMD Opteron processors."