SYSTEMS

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s (NASDAQ:SUNW) Sun Fire(TM) 12K server, a flagship product of Sun's industry-leading, high-end UNIX(R) server line, was named by eWEEK, a Ziff Davis Media publication and one of the IT industry's leading enterprise IT magazines, as the winner of its Third Annual Excellence Awards in the Server Hardware category. Introduced one year ago this week, the Sun Fire 12K server, which shares key features with the entire Sun Fire line of midframe and high-end systems, was recognized by eWEEK for its flexibility, pay-as-you-go expandability and overall mainframe-class capabilities. The Third Annual eWEEK Excellence Awards program provides enterprise IT professionals with a benchmark for assessing a wide range of technology products and services. Evaluating the entries was a panel of experts including eWEEK Labs analysts and eWEEK Corporate Partners, providing a unique mix of technical and real-world analysis. "With new low-end Linux solutions and blade servers being hot news this year, eWEEK made a significant statement by choosing a high-end UNIX system as the winner of its prestigious Excellence award in the Server Hardware category," said Clark Masters, executive vice president, Enterprise Systems Products at Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Its choice of the Sun Fire 12K server over other high-end systems, as well as new blade servers, illustrates the industry's continued focus on high-performance, highly available SMP computing platforms. This is one of Sun's integral building blocks for the Business- Ready Infrastructure, delivering exactly what CIOs need today: rock-solid availability, massive scalability, binary compatibility, and support for thousands of mission-critical applications." Sharing the same robust system architecture as the Sun Fire midframe and high-end server line, which includes the Sun Fire 4800, Sun Fire 6800 and Sun Fire 15K systems, the Sun Fire 12K server is based on the award-winning Solaris(TM) Operating System and supports as many as 52 UltraSPARC(R) III 1.2GHz processors and 288GB of memory. The eWEEK judges were impressed with the system's Uniboard technology, a CPU/memory board architecture that allows the system to be dynamically reconfigured without shutting it down; its Dynamic System Domains, which dynamically allocate resources to applications within different operating systems; and the recently introduced Capacity on Demand 2.0 (COD 2.0), a pay-as-you-go feature that helps lower system acquisition costs while increasing scalability and flexibility. The combination of these capabilities makes the system "ideal for server consolidation, high-end computing and mission-critical application needs," noted eWEEK's Francis Chu. "eWEEK provides news, views and reviews, so that enterprise IT buyers can make informed purchasing decisions," said Eric Lundquist, editor-in-chief of eWEEK. "The Excellence Awards winners exemplify the best enterprise IT solutions on the market."