Sun unveils high-performance, eco-responsible Server Line

Sun's major moves across its software, hardware and services offerings are driving some of the most significant changes the industry has seen in years, forever changing the game for datacenter customers. Setting a new industry standard for performance, space and energy efficiency, powered by the breakthrough technology of the UltraSPARC T1 processor, Sun's new server line beats the competition on performance, slashing energy consumption and reducing costly datacenter space requirements.

For example, Sun's new systems are more than three times faster than IBM Xeon systems at nearly half the power and cooling costs and with 4.2 times better performance per watt. CoolThreads servers also have nearly seven times greater performance than Dell Xeon systems and have 76 percent more performance at 2.3 times lower power consumption than an IBM 4-way Power 5+ system, while costing nearly half as much. This new server announcement, along with previous x64 and UltraSPARC IV+ server announcements, make Sun's server line-up the most compelling offering for customers looking to turbocharge their datacenter for the next wave of the Internet.

Changing the Game, new Products and Offerings from Sun

Sun Fire T1000/T2000 servers. Toppling a series of world-record benchmarks to claim its leading position for price/performance, Sun announced today the release of the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers featuring patented CoolThreads technology. A major advancement that leverages the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), the new server line is based on the recently announced, massively-threaded UltraSPARC T1 processor and offers industry leading, world record price/performance for web, database and application processing. The new system is designed to save customers millions in power, cooling and space costs. The new Sun Fire T2000 server is available immediately, and the Sun Fire T1000 can be ordered now for delivery in March 2006. Both servers include a host of new integrated offers designed to stimulate rapid adoption.

OpenSPARC Project. Sun announced its intent to open source its UltraSPARC processor technology and publish certain specifications for the UltraSPARC-based chip including the source of the design expressed in Verilog, a verification suite and simulation models, instruction set architecture specification (UltraSPARC Architecture 2005) and a Solaris OS port.

Try It Before You Buy It. Given the high level of interest in these new breakthrough systems, Sun is now offering the industry's largest "Try and Buy" program that enables customers and ISV partners to test out a new Sun Fire T1000 or T2000 server running the highly threaded UltraSPARC T1 processor free of charge for 90 days, with the option to purchase the system at the end. For more information, go to: sun.com/emrkt/trycoolthreads.

Space, Wattage and Performance (SWaP) Metric. Sun is also announcing an important new metric for customers to use as they evaluate their datacenter efficiencies and systems performance. It is the big picture for datacenter managers. it measures Space, Wattage and Performance (SWaP). The new SWaP metric is the only true measure of industry-standard server efficiency: performance / (space x power).

Full Protection Plans. Sun also announced two new Full Protection Plans, integrated system and services programs that offer customers low total cost of ownership, reduced budgetary risk and increased system availability. When customers choose the Sun Fire T1000 or T2000 system, they get more than just a server; they receive the world's most powerful operating system, Solaris 10, and the option to purchase a Full Protection Plan that goes far beyond basic break/fix warranty programs. Sun's Full Protection Plans are simple to purchase, include the essential, recommended services and offer transparent three-year pricing that enables customers to predict and better manage their IT budgets.

CoolThreads Prize For Innovation. Sun launched its CoolThreads competition to inspire new software development for its breakthrough Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 server line. In this competition, developers and ISVs have the opportunity to win $50,000 in cash by developing ground-breaking applications or improving on existing applications, within the next six months, for optimal throughput performance and scaling. For further details about the CoolThreads Developer Contest and full contest rules, please visit https://coolthreads.dev.java.net.

Sun N1 System Management software. Sun N1 System Manager v1.2 now includes support for the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers. This integrated solution allows customers to perform operating system provisioning and system management of the Sun Fire servers announced today and Sun's x64 industry-standard systems announced in September. Sun Management Console 3.6 adds support for several Solaris 10 features including Dynamic Tracing, Predictive Self-Healing and Solaris Containers. The Sun N1 Management portfolio includes Sun N1 System Manager, Sun Management Center, N1 Service Provisioning System and the Sun N1 Grid Engine. These products help enterprises lower operational costs and improve business efficiency by simplifying the management of systems and services in customers' heterogeneous datacenters.

Today's announcements follow on the heels of major product developments announced by Sun throughout the quarter, including:

Solaris Enterprise System. On Nov. 30, Sun announced plans to make the Java Enterprise System, Sun N1 Management software and Sun Studio Developer tools available at no cost for both development and deployment. All of this software, along with the Solaris OS, will be integrated into the Solaris Enterprise System making it the the only comprehensive and open infrastructure software platform available today.

Solaris 10 Operating System. On Nov. 17, Sun expanded its commitment to delivering and supporting powerful open source solutions for the enterprise and announced: that it will distribute and support the Postgres database with the Solaris OS; new features in OpenSolaris including Solaris Containers for Linux Applications; availability of the source code for Solaris ZFS, a revolutionary new 128-bit file system with unprecedented error detection and correction capabilities and participation in the Xen open source project. Solaris 10, the most advanced operating system on the planet, is available for both UltraSPARC and industry standard x86/x64 systems. The Solaris OS is the only operating system that guarantees binary compatibility on supported platforms and source code compatibility between UltraSPARC and x64 platforms ensuring that applications written for Sun's UltraSPARC platform run unmodified on Sun's new Sun Fire systems. The Solaris 10 OS includes innovative features not available on other platforms, such as DTrace, Predictive Self Healing and Containers, to provide the highest levels of application performance, availability, security and consolidation.

Sun Summit on 21st Century Eco-Responsibility. On Nov. 14 at its first ever Sun Summit on 21st Century Eco-Responsibility, Sun discussed how its approach to eco-responsible computing is good for the IT industry and detailed how it is marrying eco-friendly product design with high performance technologies. Sun's McNealy was joined by Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos and a panel of environmental thought leaders to discuss how eco-responsibility can minimize harm to the planet and benefit business. For more information or to view the webcast, follow this link.

UltraSPARC T1 processors with CoolThreads technology. On Nov. 14 Sun introduced the UltraSPARC T1 , code named "Niagara", as the world's first high-performance, energy-efficient processor. Using patented CoolThreads chip multi-threading technology that leverages the threaded nature of the Solaris 10 OS, the breakthrough chip is the world's first eco-responsible processor. In an era in which most processors use at least 40 watts/thread, each SPARC-based CoolThreads processor uses five percent the energy per thread of Intel Xeon or IBM Power processors at just two watts per thread. Sun's new processor offers unparalleled transactional throughput and is designed to save customers millions of dollars on rising datacenter power, cooling and space costs.

Storage Titanium Tape Drive T10000. On Nov. 3, Sun introduced the T10000 enterprise tape drive, extending the value and performance delivered via StorageTek's earlier T-Series drives, to provide businesses with fast access to large volumes of information at an attractive price per gigabyte. Delivering the industry's highest native tape drive throughput rate (120 megabytes/second), capacity of up to 500 gigabytes uncompressed. or a terabyte of compressed data on a single cartridge. and Fibre Channel and FICON dual-port connectivity, the T10000 delivers a 250 percent increase in density and 400 percent increase in throughput speeds over the earlier StorageTek T9940B drive.

Developer Community. On Oct. 26, Sun launched its latest release of Sun Studio 11 with enhancements designed to simplify the development process and deliver the highest optimization and best performance for the development of scalable 32-bit and 64-bit applications on multi-core and multi-threaded systems. This results in an increase in developer productivity while requiring less hardware, electricity and footprint when deploying these demanding applications into production. Sun Studio software has contributed to 13 performance world records announced in 2005, with five recorded on this latest product release.

UltraSPARC IV+ Processor. On Sept. 20, Sun announced the release of Sun Fire servers powered by new UltraSPARC IV+ processors. The new systems offer customers up to a fivefold increase in performance over previous UltraSPARC processor generations. These recently announced systems deliver the industry's only "on the fly" upgrade path that allows customers to protect their investments in existing applications and infrastructure by leveraging the binary compatibility of the UltraSPARC processor and the Solaris OS to quickly and easily take advantage of the latest server technology.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

A singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world's most important markets. Sun's philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at sun.com homepage.