STORAGE

PALO ALTO, CA -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced upgrades to its best selling storage array for the workgroup and enterprise -- the Sun StorEdge(TM) T3 array. The array features a new controller that delivers exceptional performance, increased resiliency, and a solid Storage Area Network (SAN) foundation. With the new controller, the Sun StorEdge T3 array drives customers' Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for storage to one of the lowest levels in the industry. The new Sun StorEdge T3 array enhancements, combined with Sun StorEdge SRM 5.0 storage resource management software, helps enable customers to maximize utilization of their storage resources for the greatest return on their storage investment, while dramatically lowering TCO. With this announcement, Sun is furthering its strategy to deliver leading storage solutions that are optimized for the Solaris(TM) Operating Environment, yet open to support heterogeneous environments. "Sun's goal is to provide our customers with the modular scalability they are demanding while ensuring that their storage systems maintain longevity," said James Staten, Director of Strategy, Sun Network Storage. "The powerful combination of the Sun StorEdge T3 array and SRM 5.0 software helps customers achieve extremely low storage TCO by providing cost-effective and predictable scalability, easy manageability and the tools to maximize utilization storage resources while effectively planning for future requirements." The Sun StorEdge T3 array has always delivered exceptionally low TCO through its low entry cost, ability to scale in small increments, easy deployment and manageability, flexibility to deploy and redeploy a single technology across a wide range of applications, small footprint, and low power consumption, as well as its unique three-way linear scalability of capacity, performance and availability. The enhanced array drives TCO down further by providing even lower price/performance, fewer settings to optimize performance, increased reliability, extended SAN support, dynamic failover and load balancing, and the ability to do a hot upgrade to the new controller. In addition, the new Sun StorEdge T3 array will integrate and co-exist with previously installed T3 arrays, protecting customers' existing storage investment. The array now includes: -- Enhanced controller with four times the cache as the original Sun StorEdge T3 array -- Doubled processor speeds for faster throughput -- SAN fabric topology support for Solaris operating environment with integrated failover and load balancing -- Increased resiliency through error detection and correction circuitry on the cache and RAID5 calculation accumulators -- Sun StorEdge SAN 3.0 software providing extended SAN support and better SAN management for Windows NT, IBM AIX and HP/UX -- Integrated Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager software automating failover and load balancing dynamically across the entire SAN Sun StorEdge SAN 3.0 software also provides additional opportunities to lower TCO. It supports greater distances (up to 10 kilometers), helping enable customers to consolidate storage by installing and managing larger SANs or to implement disaster tolerant systems for business continuance. In addition, SAN 3.0 software allows data backup to fibre channel tape drives using the existing fibre channel disk storage infrastructure. "I am so impressed with the latest Sun StorEdge T3 arrays...we install them and then use the management tools to deploy and monitor them. Bottom line, this product is a win-win," said Charles Sears, Manager of Research Computing for Oregon State University College of Oceanic & Atmospheric Sciences. Rudolf Dimper, Head of the Systems and Communications Group at ESRF adds that "the nature of the research at the ESRF mandates that we must continually enhance our IT infrastructure...That means as new technology is released by Sun such as higher capacity versions (1 GB cache controller) of the Sun StorEdge T3 solution or the next generation of this product, we will add it to our infrastructure. In addition, we are currently working with Sun to port compute intensive applications to Sun's UltraSPARC(TM) III. From my point of view, Sun is the only credible professional UNIX(R) supplier remaining in the market." For further information visit www.sun.com