SYSTEMS

SAN FRANCISCO -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced a broad range of price and performance enhancements across its midrange and high-end, Solaris(TM) based Sun Fire(TM) system line, driving down total cost of ownership (TCO). In addition to continued SPARC(R) processor innovation, Sun announced reductions on U.S. list prices across its midrange and high-end Solaris systems -- including the Sun Fire 4800, 6800, 12K and 15K servers -- resulting in 25 to 35 percent price/performance improvements on most customer configurations. "New innovations and continued SPARC leadership enable us to pass better performance and price savings on to customers," said Clark Masters, executive vice president, Enterprise Systems Products, Sun Microsystems. "More customers worldwide turn to Sun than any other vendor for highly reliable network computing infrastructure for the data center. Today we're showing that rather than rest on our laurels, we're going to continue to drive cost and complexity down -- while taking it to the competition." High-End Features and Enhancements Only Sun Can Deliver Sun boosted processor performance of its midrange and high-end Sun Fire systems by 34 percent with the first system implementation of Sun's 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC(R) III processor, which uses the Sun(TM) ONE Compiler R8 technology and consumes 30 percent less power than current UltraSPARC III processors. "While other vendors are abandoning UNIX(R), Sun is doubling down on Solaris and remains the leading provider of UNIX systems," said Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president, Sun's Software Group. "While some customers may be feeling anxious about their vendor's UNIX commitment, Sun continues to provide both investment protection and a comprehensive roadmap of innovation for Solaris-based systems." Sun also added Enhanced Memory Placement Optimization technology, designed to improve system performance for memory-resident applications, such as high-performance technical computing, datawarehousing and ERP applications. Sun is the only vendor to offer capabilities such as support for more than one-half terabyte of memory in a single domain in a single system and flexible Dynamic Reconfiguration of system components -- allowing customers to perform live upgrades to a system's hardware resources such as CPUs, memory, and I/O while the system is still running. Sun also announced enhanced Capacity On Demand (COD) 2.0, which simplifies system scalability and provides instant access to hardware resources with no price premium. Sun Fire high-end systems also feature unique fault-isolated Dynamic System Domain technology, which is ideal for server consolidation. More than 75 percent of Sun Fire 15K systems ship pre-configured with multiple domains, indicating that a large majority of customers run multiple applications. With this capability, customers can then add more domains or reconfigure domains while the system is running and in production. Sun's systems also support industry-unique features like Uniboard CPU/Memory boards, which can be shared among any Sun Fire midrange or high-end system and can support mixed-speed CPUs in the same domain. For Uniboards with 900 MHz or higher UltraSPARC III processors, customers can add faster processors to a domain without swapping-out all of the processors in the system, further extending investment protection for Sun customers. Sun also announced that its Enterprise Data Warehouse Reference Architecture (EDW RA) has been expanded to include the Sun Fire 12K system as one of its core components. The EDW RA tests, which included data loading and query and reporting, have demonstrated that customers can obtain higher levels of performance and functionality, as well as better price/performance. Sun Boosts Real-World Performance by 44 Percent; Sets New World Record As a result of its new system upgrades, Sun set a new world record for the SAP-SD Benchmark, improving is own results by 44 percent on a Sun Fire 15K system. The new record was set on the SAP R/3 release 4.6C Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) 2-tier Application benchmark. The test, which was run on the Sun Fire 15K system with 104 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC III CPUs and 576 GB of memory, in combination with Sun StorEdge(TM) T3 arrays, and running the Solaris 9 Operating Environment and Oracle 9i database, achieved 813,010 order line items per hour, supporting 8000 SAP-SD benchmark users at an average dialog response time of 1.81 seconds. These new results are 44 percent faster on a per CPU basis than Sun's 900 MHz processors. (See related press release, "Sun Fire 15K Server Sets New World Record Performance on SAP Standard Application SD Benchmark" at http://www.sun.com/presskits/networkcomputing03).