Vendor Spotlight:

SUN UPS PERFORMANCE WITH SOLARIS 10, OFFERS FREE OF CHARGE

At its Network Computing '04Q4 (NC04Q4) launch, Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that the best selling 4-way UNIX server in the industry, the Sun Fire V440, just got better thanks to the new 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC IIIi processor running the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), which will soon be free of charge. Additionally, Sun previewed the radical new Chip Multithreading (CMT) technology used in its Niagara processor design, due to hit the market in 2006, with 32 high- performance threads on a single piece of silicon.

"The key to unlocking the potential of Sun's new Niagara processor-based systems will be the ability to manage the highly threaded environment using Solaris," said Kevin Krewell, senior analyst for Microprocessor Report. "Here, Sun has a significant advantage over the open-source Linux operating system. Niagara pushes the envelope of highly threaded yet power efficient server systems."

"Solaris 10 will dramatically increase the performance of our existing and future UltraSPARC systems," said David Yen, executive vice president, scalable systems group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "From the current design of our UltraSPARC IIIi-based systems all the way to the radical architecture of the Niagara processor, Sun is completely rethinking how systems are architected in order to provide the best application throughput in the most dense and lowest power form factor in the industry."

Solaris 10 Makes UltraSPARC Faster

The industry leading innovation in the Solaris 10 OS will allow Sun's existing UltraSPARC system customers to dramatically improve server performance without changing their hardware environment. For example, according to internal benchmarks, customers who upgrade to the Solaris 10 OS on their UltraSPARC systems can benefit from a 47 to 73 percent increase in Web Server performance from the Solaris 9 and Solaris 8 OS, respectively.

Additionally, the new features in Solaris 10 have been optimized for UltraSPARC IV and UltraSPARC IIIi-based systems to further increase system speed, efficiency and overall throughput. Starting at under $12,000 (USD), the new Sun Fire V440, running the Solaris 10 OS, is setting the standard for single threaded application performance:

• Sun Fire V440 record breaking price-performance on Solaris 10: Running Solaris 10 and operating at 1.6 GHz, Sun's best selling UltraSPARC IIIi Sun Fire V440 server achieved world record price-performance among all TPC- H@100GB submissions. This is a price/performance improvement of more than 32 percent over the previous V440 submission. At $54,276.55 (USD), the Sun Fire V440 server offers the lowest total cost of ownership of any 4-way submission at 100GB by 15 percent. In second place is the 1.28GHz Sun Fire V440 at $67,704 (USD).

Early results are also demonstrating significant performance enhancements for the Solaris 10 OS running on Sun's dual-core UltraSPARC IV-based systems:

• Sun Fire V490 leads the data warehouse pack with Solaris 10: The 4-way Sun Fire V490 server achieved world record price/performance running Solaris 10 on the 1-TB TPC-H benchmark, demonstrating the highest performance data warehousing and database architecture at this price point. The Sun Fire V490 server delivered 2,958 QphH@1000GB at a price performance of US$52/QphH@1000GB.

Sun Makes Blockbuster Solaris 10 Free of Charge for Commercial Use

Sun plans to make Solaris 10 available for SPARC , x86, AMD64 and EM64T systems as a free download by January 31, 2005. Unlike other free distributions which provide only "early access" or "evaluation" free, Sun will provide its commercial grade Solaris 10 product free for deployment. A range of services are available for a fee. Solaris 10 is a vendor-neutral operating system that is supported on more than 270 different hardware platforms from vendors as diverse as Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, IBM and HP. Sun also unveiled a new advertising campaign and game-changing business model in support of the Solaris 10 launch.

"Operating systems matter now more than ever," said Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Solaris 10 is an industry milestone, bar none. This is the result of Sun's huge investment in R&D and demonstrates how superior engineering can deliver real customer advantage. With thousands of customers previewing Solaris 10 as part of the Sun Software Express for Solaris program and more than a half million installations of the product so far, Solaris 10 is the most anticipated product release in the history of Sun."

Designed for modern datacenter workloads, Solaris 10 is the fastest operating system ever released by Sun -- more than 40 percent faster than Solaris 9 in web server performance on both SPARC and x86.

Key features include:

1) DTrace -- With new diagnostic tools in Solaris 10, developers can quickly zero in on performance issues and hard-to-find bugs so that problems can be diagnosed in milliseconds and minutes, not hours or days.

2) Solaris Containers -- Solaris 10 is the only OS to provide multiple software partitions with more than 8000 containers - on one instance of the OS. Resources can be automatically re-allocated, achieving up to 80 percent system utilization.

3) Process Rights Management -- Solaris 10 now includes technology from the Trusted Solaris operating system, widely used for U.S. government secure communications. Process Rights Management uses a more granular privilege use model to help ensure that application vulnerabilities cannot be exploited and lead to widespread system damage. 4) Predictive Self Healing -- Solaris 10 can automatically diagnose, isolate and recover from many hardware and application faults to vastly reduce system downtime.

5) Linux Application Environment (previously code named Project Janus) -- Solaris 10 will be the only OS to run Solaris and native Linux binaries side- by-side with no modifications, providing customers with investment protection and broader access to applications written for both operating systems.

6) ZFS -- With 16 billion times more capacity than current 64-bit file systems, ZFS will be the industry's only file system with virtually unlimited storage capacity, helping to make Solaris 10 the industry's best OS for data storage. ZFS can reduce administrative overhead by up to 80 percent and provides provable data integrity with a 99.99999999999999999 percent chance of error detection and correction.

7) Cryptographic Framework -- Based on the industry accepted PKCS#11 standard, this new framework enhances performance and centralizes management of cryptographic operations. Application developers can write to a common API, which helps IT organizations protect their investment in applications and helps Sun partners write applications without worrying about the underlying cryptographic implementation.

8) Sun Update Connection -- An update service that allows users to analyze the system and stay up-to-date from almost anywhere, the Sun Update Connection provides notifications, enables users to act locally using a single-system updater and deploy remotely using Sun's update portal.

9) AMD64 -- Solaris 10 is optimized for AMD Opteron 64-bit processors, providing far greater performance than previously available on low-cost architectures, while continuing to provide binary compatibility between 32-bit and 64-bit environments.

10) Guaranteed Compatibility -- Sun offers the Solaris Application Guarantee to ensure that applications written for previous versions of Solaris will run on Solaris 10. Extending backwards compatibility to Solaris 2.6, this guarantee covers an unprecedented seven years of OS releases.

"For more than 18 years, SAS has worked closely with Sun to ensure technology compatibility," said Keith Collins, CTO of SAS. "We are encouraged by the advances Sun is delivering in Solaris 10 and the direction of the company. Our strong, strategic partnership with Sun allows us to work directly with their developers during all stages of development, which means we have not had to make any special changes to SAS for Solaris 10. SAS products are fully optimized and certified to run on the Solaris system making integration of SAS 9 and Solaris 10 seamless."

Originally launched in 1991, Solaris has become the #1 UNIX operating system. Nearly all of the global Fortune 1000 run Solaris. A growing base of more than 1000 ISVs with more than 12,000 applications enable it to be deployed from the datacenter to the desktop. Solaris 10 will become Sun's flagship distribution for current and future system platforms.

Schwartz added, "Solaris 10 firmly establishes us far ahead of the competition. We will make this very clear to the market -- our development community, ISVs and partners have a unique advantage over HP and IBM."