Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

SUN GRABS SIGNIFICANT FOOTHOLD IN STORAGE MARKET

At Storage Networking World (SNW), Sun Microsystems Inc announced substantial customer wins in a variety of industries, offering mounting evidence of its momentum in the storage market. Sun's delivery of its heterogeneous, competitively priced Sun StorEdge solutions has attracted leading companies and organizations including Blue Shield, EPL, Howrey, Lodgian and Trader Publishing.

"Customer needs have changed dramatically over the last 18 months and Sun has responded with open, flexible storage solutions that reduce complexity and lower cost of ownership," said Mark Canepa, executive vice president of Sun Network Storage. "From health care to hotels, customers from a wide spectrum of industries are receiving tangible benefits from our Sun StorEdge solutions. Today we are extending these benefits by committing to make all of our hardware and software offerings compliant with the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S)."

"Sun is executing on its commitment to offer customers simplified, interoperable, competitively priced systems," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst of Enterprise Storage Group. "In a tight IT spending environment, it's encouraging to see Sun's continued investment in helping solve data management and price-performance challenges."

Sun moved to the No. 2 ranking for total UNIX systems storage revenue and increased market share, closing in on No. 1 HP as reflected in IDC's Q2-2003 Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker Report, published September 2003 by IDC. As reported, Sun was the only storage company that demonstrated double-digit revenue growth in every major category quarter-over- quarter, validating a position of strength in today's difficult, competitive market.

Customers Embrace Sun StorEdge Solutions

Sun provides enterprises with the services and technology expertise to design and implement end-to-end solutions with its Sun StorEdge 3000, 6000 and 9000 series. This approach has prompted a wide variety of new customer adoptions:

Blue Shield

With 2.6 million members and $6 billion in annual revenue, Blue Shield of California is the state's third largest health plan. Blue Shield currently runs a Sun StorEdge 9980 system on Solaris for application management. "We needed a storage solution that was capable of working with products from a variety of vendors. EDS, Sun and Ingenix helped us to implement an end-to-end solution, including the Sun StorEdge 9980, that has allowed us to incorporate a variety of platforms," said Jim Verbosky, director of IT infrastructure at Blue Shield of California.

EPL

Founded in 1977, EPL is a full-service provider of integrated data processing solutions and technology to credit unions. Wholly owned by credit unions which are also users of its products and services, EPL serves more than 150 credit unions nationwide. "The Sun StorEdge 6320 system already has all the necessary redundancy built in. That's one of the big reasons why we selected it. There are multi-million dollar storage systems from mainframe vendors that don't have as much redundancy as a Sun StorEdge 6320," said Michael Stoeckert, chief information officer and chief technology officer at EPL.

Howrey

Howrey Simon Arnold & White LLP is an international law firm whose antitrust, global litigation and intellectual property practices are among the largest and most successful in the world. Howrey called on Sun to help them facilitate courtroom success through rapid, reliable and secure access of documents and applications enterprise-wide. "Sun StorEdge technologies provide the priceperformance we require in order to be in line with our profitability objectives and the services to maintain a 99.999 percent level of availability that supports our business goals in a heterogeneous systems environment. Our attorneys can focus on their cases, not on administrative activities," said Bob Ruyak, managing partner and chief executive officer Howrey Simon Arnold & White at LLP.

Lodgian

One of the largest independent owners and operators of full-service hotels in the United States, Atlanta-based Lodgian Inc currently manages a portfolio of 97 hotel franchises including InterContinental Hotels Group (Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn) and Marriott brands. Lodgian needed to ensure the robust performance of its financial and payroll systems and chose the Sun StorEdge 6320 to meet those needs. "Sun gathered performance statistics, using VdBench, on Lodgian's Oracle ERP systems, and the results showed that the Sun StorEdge 6320 outperformed our existing EMC Clariion 4700. Further analysis by Sun indicates that the 6320 would also outperform the EMC CX600," said Charlie James, vice president of technology at Lodgian Inc.

Trader Publishing

Trader Publishing owns and operates Traderonline.com, a collection of 14 hightraffic Web sites that receives millions of visitors each week. A Sun Fire platform, StorEdge technology and the Solaris 8 Operating System provide the end-to-end infrastructure. "The Sun StorEdge 3910, Sun Fire 6800 and Sun StorEdge Availability Suite software combine to create a complete solution that improves storage efficiency, simplifies backup and recovery management and increases availability," said Joe Fuller, chief technology officer at Trader Electronic Media.

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 make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at sun.com/.