Sun Sets New World Records With Enhanced UltraSPARC IV+ Servers Running Solaris

Sun Boosts Performance On UltraSPARC Servers, Show Sun's UltraSPARC Leadership
SANTA CLARA, Calif. April 3, 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced the availability of faster 1.95GHz and 2.1GHz UltraSPARC(R) IV+ processors for its popular Sun Fire servers. New Sun Fire servers with UltraSPARC IV+ 1.95GHz and 2.1GHz processors offer world record performance, easy application portability and industry leading investment protection. The new servers are powered by the Solaris Operating System (OS), which delivers customers unbroken binary compatibility, thus ensuring that existing applications will run on the new UltraSPARC IV+ processors without the need to re-code or re-compile.

According to industry analyst reports, Sun has gained market share for four consecutive quarters. SPARC-based systems represent a significant portion of that growth and the new 1.95GHz and 2.1 GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processors demonstrate Sun's ongoing commitment to improving the performance of the SPARC architecture and the protection of customer investment.

"SPARC, with Solaris, is the engine that drives our server business, and we're committed to continual improvements on our SPARC-based products," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "The growing demand for UltraSPARC IV+ servers has helped Sun build tremendous market momentum in our systems line-up, and steal significant market share at the expense of our competitors."

Sun Sets New World Records

The Sun Fire E2900 with UltraSPARC IV+ 1.95 GHz (US-IV+1.95GHz) set a new world-record for a single application server, with a Sun Fire T2000 as the database server, on SPECjAppServer2004 achieving >1781 JOPS - the highest 2-node result performance record to date. The Sun Fire (US-IV+1.95GHz) uses six Solaris containers which - through consolidation - improves datacenter efficiency and promotes higher levels of system utilization.1

The Sun Fire E6900 (24 processors, 48 cores, 48 threads) with UltraSPARC IV+ 1.95GHz set a new world-record for the SAP-SD 2-Tier Standard Application benchmark for systems with 24 or fewer processors as of 04/02/07, achieving 6160 users.2

Sun Fire UltraSPARC IV+ servers now own over 75 world-record benchmarks.

The Sun Fire V490, V890, E2900, E4900, E6900, E20K and E25K servers, powered by new 1.95GHz and 2.1GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processors have up to 2x the life of comparable IBM servers and up to 1/3 better TCO.

When compared to previous generations, the new UltraSPARC IV+ processor has shown 2X performance over the UltraSPARC IV and 5X performance over the UltraSPARC III.

Sun Fire UltraSPARC platforms are designed to help customers with CRM, business intelligence/data warehousing, and enterprise applications using large databases. The systems are ideal for virtualization environments using a combination of fault isolated hard partitions and flexible Solaris Containers. Solaris 10 Containers can consolidate and virtualize hundreds of applications on a single system so customers save in energy, space and complexity. Solaris Container management is superior to HP and IBM partitioning strategies as it requires less overhead, while providing resource flexibility down to a single processor.