STORAGE

SANTA CLARA, CA -- Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced that the Storage Performance Council (SPC), an industry standards body, has released final results for SPC Benchmark 1(TM) (SPC-1), demonstrating Sun's technological leadership, competitive edge and support of open standards in the storage industry. SPC-1 and its corresponding results have been established to provide customers with a clearly applicable, vendor-neutral process to accurately compare and configure direct attach or network storage technology. Based on the SPC-1 benchmark tests, Sun's StorEdge 9910 system delivered best-in-class performance, with 30% better response time than IBM's Enterprise Storage Server. When the Sun and IBM systems are configured similarly, data center customers interested in matching Sun's unprecedented performance levels are forced to use -- and pay for -- an IBM system with considerably greater capacity than Sun's StorEdge 9910 system. Sun not only outperforms the competition but is priced substantially less than the IBM system. When scaling the Sun StorEdge 9910 system to the same capacity as IBM's Shark product, customers will then realize definite price/performance advantages. "We are very proud of our achievements with the SPC-1 benchmark," said Kathleen Holmgren, VP Marketing, Sun Storage. "The results prove what we have been telling our customers all along -- Sun's Complete Storage Solutions support open standards, provide the lowest TCO and outperforms the competition. We look forward to working with the SPC on future independent benchmark and standards efforts and encourage all storage vendors to participate. We're disappointed that EMC is not putting forth the effort to support their claims by participating in these independent benchmark tests and standards development efforts." About the Sun StorEdge 9910 system The Sun StorEdge(TM) 9910 system is a key component of Sun's Complete Storage Solutions offering. The system is ideal for data center class, reliability, connectivity and performance. With 24 Fibre Channel, ESCON, or FICON host interfaces and fast fibre back end bandwidth, the Sun StorEdge 9910 system performed well above any competing datacenter class product in the SPC-1 benchmark tests. The Sun StorEdge 9910 system provides: The Sun StorEdge 9910 system is ideal for high-reliability, high-connectivity, multi-platform, application-specific or distributed deployment environments. These powerful storage systems deliver heterogeneity for open systems and mainframe environments, plus the highest levels of availability and performance, enabling customers to optimize to their precise needs -- from performance to availability, consolidation, and more. Customers are maximizing utilization of existing storage resources, driving costs down, minimizing complexity, and increasing service levels by consolidating IT resources with Sun StorEdge 9910 storage systems, while simultaneously boosting performance. -- Over 8.7 TB raw capacity -- 48 drive capacity (up to 4 hot spares) -- SAN connectivity -- handles up to 3072 host connections -- 16 data paths provide 3.2 GB/sec bandwidth and extreme system resiliency -- RAID 1+ or RAID 5 gives customers a choice of HDD protection, resiliency, and performance -- Optimization for the Sun platform and Sun's Complete Storage Solutions About the Storage Performance Council The SPC is a non-profit corporation founded to define, standardize and promote storage system benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable performance data to the computer industry and its customers. The SPC is the only industry standards organization that defines and promotes storage benchmarks as well as disseminates objective, relevant and verifiable performance data and related test tools to the computer industry and its customers. Its members include Adaptec, Compaq, Dell, Evaluator Group, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Ideas International, LSI Logic Storage Systems, NEC, Sun Microsystems, Unisys and VERITAS Software. SPC membership is open to all companies, academic institutions and individuals.