Cluster Computing:

SUN CLUSTER SOFTWARE POWERS MLB.COM, OTHERS

With Major League Baseball's playoffs now in full swing, record numbers of fans are visiting MLB.com for up-to-the-minute information about their favorite teams and players. Uptime at the site is a critical success factor and MLB.com continues to partner with Sun Microsystems to power its web platform. MLB.com is among a growing list of customers that have adopted Sun's Sun Cluster high availability software, including International Speedway, MLB.com, Orange Caraibe, and the Virginia Department of Health. More and more customers are choosing Sun Cluster software for improved predictability, resiliency and manageability of their most important application services- delivering up to 99.999 percent availability.

"With up to 15 live games per day during the baseball season and more than 6,000 audio streamed games per year, it is critical that we have a reliable platform for our mission-critical user application services," said Justin Shaffer, VP and Chief Architect at Major League Baseball's MLB.com. "For uptime and high-availability, we chose a combination of Sun's Sun Fire 15K servers and StorEdge 9900 along with the Sun Cluster software."

MLB.com offers fans real-time baseball information, including up-to-date statistics, game summaries, extensive historical information, and exclusive features about Major League Baseball events and programs. This includes on- line ticket sales, fantasy baseball leagues, live radio broadcast of games, live and archived webcasts of games, pitch-by-pitch enactment of games, and video highlights.

Uptime and availability is also critical at the Virginia Department of Health, where the mission-critical communications infrastructure handles everything from day to day operations to more critical public health situations such as epidemics when communications loads are at their highest.

"Availability was a big concern when email volumes began topping 40,000 messages per day," said Dr. Jim Burns, director of the Richmond-based Virginia Department of Health, which employs 4,000 people. "Now that we have upgraded our communications infrastructure to the Sun Java System Messaging Server and Sun Java System Directory Server, our hardware platform to the SunFire V480 and Sun Fire 280R servers, along with the Solaris Operating System and Sun Cluster software for availability, the department has consistently maintained 100 percent uptime. We are very pleased with the results."

Sun recently announced a new release of the Sun Cluster 3 software, providing a powerful new graphical user interface and simplified volume management for Oracle9i Real Application Clusters (RAC) deployments. Enhancements include:

• Improved Manageability and Scalability: Sun Cluster software's new graphical user interface enables users to administer, view and manage their cluster and large-scale datacenter deployments more powerfully and easily than before. This release also extends Sun Cluster software scalability to 16 nodes, further expanding a cluster deployment's flexibility and expandability.
• New Sun Cluster for Oracle RAC SVM Edition: For customers deploying Oracle9i RAC, this edition bundles the Solaris Volume Manager cluster functionality with Sun Cluster software and the RAC agent, enabling powerful volume management of Oracle RAC deployments.
• Decreased Deployment Costs: Tight integration of the Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster and the Sun Cluster for Oracle9i RACagent offers customers an all- Sun software stack, greatly reducing the complexity and cost of purchasing, managing and supporting their highly available application services. With this all-Sun solution, customers can be assured that their deployment has the highest levels of reliability, availability and support.

"These features in the latest release of Sun Cluster software represent a major leap forward in Sun's service level management solution," said Mark McClain, vice president of software marketing at Sun. "Now that we have mitigated the barriers to adoption, such as cost and manageability, customers no longer have an excuse for choosing a third-party alternative."

How Sun Cluster Software Works

By tightly coupling Sun's servers, storage and networking solutions, Sun Cluster software provides the maximum level of service availability and performance for a cluster system. The servers (nodes) in a cluster communicate through private interconnects, which carry important cluster information. If one of the servers goes offline, the rest of the devices in the cluster isolate the server and "fail-over" any application or data to another node. This failover process is done quickly and transparently to the user. By exploiting the redundancy in the cluster, Sun Cluster software ensures a high level of availability. For additional information about Sun Cluster software, go to: http://wwws.sun.com/software/cluster/faq.html#2.

Pricing and Availability

Existing Sun Cluster software and Java Enterprise System customers may obtain the update for free. Pricing for Sun Cluster Software Oracle RAC SVM Edition starts at $7,000 per node.

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 http://sun.com/.