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SUN FIRE V480 GETS PERFORMANCE BOOST

Delivering on its commitment to offer low-cost computing products, Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that its Sun Fire V480 server now features 1.05 GHz UltraSPARC III Cu processors and provides greater processing power. This increase in processing power has proven a 22 percent boost in performance and a 26 percent increase in price-performance(1).

With new, industry-standard benchmark results, powered by faster, UltraSPARC III 1.05 GHz processors, combined with Sybase IQ12.5 and running the Solaris 9 operating system, the Sun Fire V480 server outperformed HP by 33 percent, proving to offer the best price-performance four-way system on the market. On performance alone, the Sun Fire V480 server outperformed Dell by 8 percent.

"Our Sun Fire V480 server aims to deliver more than what Dell, HP or any of our competitors offer -- integrated systems with more value," said Souheil Saliba, vice president of marketing, volume systems products group at Sun. "Without compromising on performance, we are sweetening our offering for our customers, providing systems with a balanced architecture, proven, scalable Sun ONE software and binary-compatibility -- all designed to reduce cost and complexity in the data center."

In the four processor rack-optimized server market (all OS), Sun grew more market share in factory revenue in Q1 2003 than any other vendor year-over- year, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, June 2003(2). This phenomenal growth was propelled by the Sun Fire V480 server.

Sun Fire V480 Server Proves Best Price-Performance

Industry-standard TPC-H 100 GB benchmark submissions among four-way 100GB systems prove that the Sun Fire V480 server offers better price-performance than Dell's PowerEdge 6650 and HP's DL580 G2 servers. The Sun Fire V480 server achieved a QphH @ 100GB result of 2,140.6 with a price-performance of $44 per QphH @ 100GB, up to 8 percent better performance than Dell, which runs at nearly twice the GHz.

Sybase IQ, a product designed specifically for data warehousing applications, was used as the database manager. The Sybase IQ RDBMS, combined with the Sun Fire V480 server, can provide dramatic reductions in the cost and amount of disk storage needed to support a data warehouse.

Pricing and Availability

The Sun Fire V480 system starts at $19,995 (USD) with two 1.05 GHz CPUs and 4GB of memory and is generally available now. The system is complementary to the Sun StorEdge 3510 Fibre Channel and 3310 SCSI arrays, and can be pre- configured and integrated onsite at Sun prior to shipping through the Sun Customer Ready Systems (CRS) program.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1882, 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 http://sun.com/.

(1) Sun Fire V480 @ 900MHz results: 1760 QphH @ 100, $60 US per QphH @ 100: March, 2003 TPC-H benchmark @100GB

(2) Sun's unit market share jumped three points from 18.4% in Q4CY02 to 21.4% in Q1CY03. Dell's market share grew 2.1 points from 12.6% in Q4CY02 to 14.7% in Q1CY03. HP grew 0.2 points from 33.2% in Q4CY02 to 33.4% in Q1CY03. IBM declined 6.8 points from 24.8% in Q4CY02 to 18.0% in Q1CY03: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, June 2003