SANTA CLARA, CA -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced that EarthLink (Nasdaq: ELNK - news), a leading national Internet service provider (ISP), has purchased new Sun systems -- including two 24-CPU, 900 MHz Sun Fire(TM) 6800 Midframe servers, Sun StorEdge(TM) 9960 system, configured in a Storage Attached Network (SAN) solution to run its billing and data warehousing applications. As its subscriber base has grown, EarthLink has needed to expand the capacity and speed of its billing system, as well as plan for future growth. To assist in these efforts, EarthLink looked to Sun, given its binary compatible, scalable platform, Solaris(TM) Operating Environment, high performance capabilities, new UltraSPARC(TM) 900 MHz processors, and its previous success in using Sun systems. Sun Fire 6800 Servers and Sun StorEdge 9960 Systems Deliver on ROI As part of its network integration efforts, EarthLink selected a system comprised of two Sun Fire 6800 servers and a storage area network of Sun StorEdge 9960 systems totaling 16 terabytes of highly reliable and easy to manage storage. Using clustering software, the Sun Fire 6800 servers will be clustered to provide the highest availability, one serving production needs and the other providing failover protection. With this reliable and powerful platform in place, EarthLink will be greatly assisted in consolidating approximately 4.8 million customer records and will eventually be able to eliminate the last of its remote billing operations, creating greater operational efficiencies and reducing costs. The new system platform provides EarthLink with increased capacity to handle its immediate needs, while providing significant scalability to accommodate future growth. ``We are very pleased with our return on investment, and we believe that Sun Microsystems has the expertise and technology to help us increase our billing capacity,'' said Mike Sugg, customer financial system manager, EarthLink. ``We needed a highly scalable and reliable environment, top-quality service and superior performance, and the deployment of the Sun Fire 6800 servers and Sun StoreEdge 9960 systems helps our system move faster.'' SAN Drastically Improves System Performance From the Get-Go Upon deployment, the SAN immediately made a difference in system performance. Overall, the Sun StoreEdge 9960 experienced an increase in speed of between 30 and 60 percent while running EarthLink applications. The increased speed benefited several areas within EarthLink, from internal systems to online customer registration. With the success of the SAN, EarthLink is looking at other areas of the company, as well, that can benefit from this technology. ``Deployment of the Sun StorEdge 9960 ran smoothly,'' stated Ron Williams, enterprise production services manager for EarthLink. ``Thanks to Sun Professional Services' great support we were able to install the Sun StorEdge 9960 and migrate over 4TB of production data to it with less than two hours of system downtime. The entire project took less than three weeks from the moment we sent in the purchase order for the Sun StorEdge 9960.''