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SUN FIRE 12K SERVER, ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE AT HALF PRICE

Sun Microsystems Inc, a market leader in high-end and entry-level servers, launched the Sun Fire 12K, a new class of low-cost, high-performance servers at previously unseen price points. The Sun Fire 12K delivers features seen in servers priced above $1 million (USD), providing customers with maximum investment protection, system availability, flexibility and application performance. Building on Sun's five-year leadership in server technology, the Sun Fire 12K also incorporates Sun's breakthrough Uniboard technology, assuring customers of interoperability with Sun's complete UltraSPARC/Solaris Operating Environment server family.

"With the Sun Fire 12K server, Sun will capitalize on a previously untapped market segment," said Rich Partridge, enterprise systems analyst at D.H. Brown Associates. "By employing the same technology as found in their well-received Sun Fire 15K, Sun now provides enterprise-class dynamic partitioning and concurrent serviceability at an attractive $500,000 price tag. The scalability of the Sun Fire 12K, along with its easy upgrade to the Sun Fire 15K, offers substantial performance headroom with investment protection."

Sun Fire 12K Beats IBM p690 On Investment Protection, Availability, and Cost

The Sun Fire 12K, Sun's "Regatta killer," offers technology that is years ahead at fractions of the price of IBM's p690. The Uniboard CPU/memory board, which is transportable and interchangeable among all Sun Fire 3800-15K systems, drives down the cost of application provisioning, and is central to customers seeking to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and improve ROI. Uniboard packaging allows customers to plan and manage entire application deployments rather than focus on one system at a time. This provides maximum investment protection, system availability, flexibility, and application performance. Sun offers Dynamic System Domains, which improve return on investment (ROI) across the IT enterprise by enabling flexible resource management. Contrary to IBM's pSeries, Sun's innovative technology and common system components allow for on-the-fly upgrade capability that enable data centers to scale according to peak demand. Furthermore, Sun's design architecture provides mixed-speed CPU support, which enables online upgrades so customers experience minimum disruption and maximum investment protection.

Customers, Partners Value Reduced TCO

"We are hitting the primary requirements of the CIO head on with open standards, best-of-breed technology, interoperability and industry-beating TCO," said Ed Zander, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems. "The Sun Fire 12K enables customers to address today's requirements with technology that will empower them to explode from the blocks at the sound of the next upturn. We continue to expand our award-winning server family while protecting customers' investments."

Strategically positioned between the Sun Fire 6800 server and the Sun Fire 15K, Sun's newest UNIX server is the ideal system for customers undertaking server consolidation and mainframe rehosting. With cross-generational and binary compatibility across the entire SPARC/Solaris OE product line, the Sun Fire 12K scales up to 52 UltraSPARC III 900 MHz processors and offers 288 GB of memory running on the Solaris 8 OE.

"The Weather Channel provides information to more than 80 million subscribers worldwide, utilizing 10,000 devices, so our main concern is how to get new services to market fast," said Brian Shield, executive vice president and CIO, The Weather Channel. "Sun systems have proven to be an ideal platform for the processing of weather forecast and content distribution to all of our customers. The Sun Fire 6800 has allowed us to achieve our goal of delivering information anytime, anywhere, and on any platform. We think the new Sun Fire 12K is an exciting new addition to Sun's product family because it offers all the features and functionality that Sun's high-end technology brings to our industry."

"The Sun Fire 12K will be an ideal choice for our customers looking to increase the ROI of their business-critical application investments," said Doug Kennedy, vice president, Platform Partnerships, Platform Technologies Division, Oracle Corporation. "Enterprise customers turn to Oracle to deliver applications that significantly improve their bottom line. We offer the same high-end feature set as on the Sun Fire 15K, but with the new price point of the Sun Fire 12K. The Sun and Oracle solution can now reach a whole new market."

The introduction of the Sun Fire 12K builds on the momentum that Sun has in the high-end server space with its Sun Fire 15K and the Sun Enterprise 10000 servers. Since its launch in September 2001, Sun has shipped close to 400 Sun Fire 15K systems to such industry leaders as IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), Kyoto University, Ocwen Technology Xchange, Reliant Resources, and San Diego Supercomputer Center, while continuing to win marketshare in the high-end space.

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 sun.com.