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

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.

For more information on Sun's UltraSPARC IV+ processor line, please visit: http://www.sun.com/servers/index.jsp?cat=Sun%20Fire%20Midrange%20Servers&tab=3&subcat=Sun%20UltraSPARC%20IV%2b/IV



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 http://sun.com

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Sun Fire, UltraSPARC, Solaris, and the Network is the Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and in other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

1. SPECjAppServer2004
1 Sun Fire E2900 (24 cores, 12 chips) and 1 Sun Fire T2000 (8 cores, 1 chip) 1781.37 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.
6 HP DL380 (12 cores, 12 chips) and 1 HP rx8620 (16 cores, 16 chips) 1664.36 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.
5 IBM xSeries 365 (20 cores, 20 chips) and 2 IBM xSeries 365 (8 cores, 8 chips) 1343.47
SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.
1 HP rx6600 (8 cores, 4 chips) and 1 HP rx8620 (16 cores, 16 chips) 1266.42 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.
5 Sun Fire X4100 (20 cores, 10 chips) and 1 Sun Fire E6900 (32 cores, 16 chips) 1781.47
SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.
SPEC, SPECjAppServer reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
Results from www.spec.org as of 04/03/2007

2. Two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard SAP ERP 2004/2005 application benchmark: Sun Fire E6900, 24 processors / 48 cores / 48 threads, UltraSPARC IV+, 1950 MHz, 128 KB(D) + 128 KB(I) L1 cache, 2 MB L2 cache on-chip, 32 MB L3 cache off-chip, 96 GB main memory. Number of benchmark users & comp.: 6,160 SD (Sales & Distribution) Average dialog response time: 1.99 seconds Throughput: Fully Processed Order Line items/hour: 616,330 Dialog steps/hour: 1,849,000 SAPS: 30,820 Average DB request time (dia/upd): 0.018 sec / 0.033 sec CPU utilization of central server: 99% Operating System central server: Solaris 10 RDBMS: Oracle 10g SAP ECC Release: 6.0. The SAP certification number was not available at press time and can be found at the following Web page: www.sap.com/benchmark

HP Integrity Superdome-16 (16 processors, 32 cores, 64 threads) 16 x 1.6 GHz Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 9050, 256GB memory, 5,600 SD benchmark users, 1.91s avg resp time, Cert#2006090, SQL Server 2005, Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition; Unisys Enterprise Server Model ES7000/one (16 processors, 32 cores, 64 threads) 16 x 1.6 GHz Dual-Core

Intel Itanium 2 9050, 256GB memory, 4,884 SD benchmark users, 1.93s avg resp time, Cert#2006091, SQL Server 2005, Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition; IBM System p5 570 (16 processors, 16 cores, 32 threads) 16 x 2.2 GHz POWER5+, 128 GB memory, 5,520 SD benchmark users, 1.97s avg resp time, Cert#2006044, DB2 UDB 8.2.2, AIX 5.3; Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 480 (32 procs, 32 cores, 32 threads) 32 x 1.6 GHz Intel Itanium 2, 256 GB memory, 5,000 SD benchmark users, 1.97s avg resp time, Cert#2006023, Oracle 9i, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9;SAP, R/3, mySAP reg TM of SAP AG in Germany and other countries. More info www.sap.com/benchmark.