Computers & Processors:

Taking Midrange Functionality to a New Level

Sun Microsystems Inc announced that its Sun Fire 3800-6800 Midframe server family, is outshipping the IBM pSeries by 35 percent and continues to attract industry leading-customers, such as Virgin Atlantic Airways, HPCVL and EarthLink. In November, Sun re-introduced the Sun Fire Midframe family with 900 MHz UltraSPARC III processors and began volume shipment of the 900 MHz systems.

Upon its introduction, the Sun Fire Midframe server family radically shifted the economics of availability in the midrange, delivering reliability, flexibility, superior performance and investment protection unprecedented in the midrange server market, creating a new class of systems -- the Midframe. Indicating the market's overwhelming acceptance of Sun's new server line over competitive systems, according to IDC's marketshare data, the Sun Fire server line outshipped IBM's new pSeries servers by an astounding 35 percent in the third quarter of 2001. Furthermore, the Sun Fire Midframe server family has increased in sequential revenue by 10 percent in the third quarter, while the latest IBM pSeries saw a 15 percent decline.

"Sun Fire Midframe servers are outshipping the competition because, quite simply, they provide the value that our customers need by delivering mainframe-class uptime at midrange prices," said Steve Campbell, Senior Director, Enterprise Systems Products for Sun Microsystems. "Customers continue to see the value in choosing Sun's robust, binary compatible product portfolio for all their IT infrastructure. With servers from $1,000 to $10 million, featuring the same operating system, chip set and code, Sun can meet the needs of virtually all companies at a competitive price point."

Sun Fire Systems Take Flight, Mass Compute and Connect the Masses

Enthusiasm for Sun Fire servers also stems from customer projects that lower total cost of ownership (TCO) of IT resources through large-scale server consolidation. EarthLink, one of the world's largest Internet service providers (ISP), chose Sun Fire servers -- four 24-CPU, 900 MHz Sun Fire 6800 servers -- to support the company's billing and data warehousing capabilities. With the Sun Fire servers in place, EarthLink will be able to consolidate approximately 4.8 million customer records, which will enable them to shut down the last of its remote billing operations, ultimately saving the company millions of dollars annually.

Sun systems were selected over IBM and a number of other vendors to serve the high performance computing (HPC) needs of four Canadian universities at the High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL) in Ontario. After conducting extensive due diligence, HPCVL decided on Sun for its innovative, leading-edge technology and its commitment to working closely with HPCVL to run and grow a world-class center for high performance computing. The center employs four Sun Fire 6800 servers totaling 192 CPUs, for a Theoretical Peak Performance (TPP) of 316.8 GFLOPS and 3.9 TB of storage on Sun StorEdge T3 disk arrays, with much more to be added soon.

With superior application performance and unmatched reliability, the Sun Fire Midframe server family easily meets the demands of today's corporate networks, giving customers a more compelling server option for their money. Recently, Virgin Atlantic Airways selected two Sun Fire 6800 servers featuring the Solaris 8 Operating Environment to run several business-critical production systems, including their Oracle database environment. Providing the best strategic and technical solution, Sun systems were chosen over IBM to replace a total of nine IBM/Sequent servers.

About Sun Microsystems Inc

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- The Network Is The Computer -- has propelled Sun Microsystems Inc to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to take their businesses to the nth. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at www.sun.com.

Contact Siobhan Lyons, Account Executive, Alexander Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Los Angeles, CA 310-407-7911, slyons@alexanderogilvy.com.