Sun Takes the Lead in Mid-Range Storage Price/Performance Across Heterogeneous Operating Systems

Sun Leads in Mid-Range Storage Benchmark

StorEdge 6920 System Achieves Best-In-Class Price/Performance Across Multiple Operating Systems in SPC-1 Benchmark

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), announced on March 7 that the vendor-independent Storage Performance Council (SPC) audited and certified benchmark results for the Sun StorEdge(TM) 6920 system that place the customer-ready storage system in first place in midrange performance and price-performance when running across multiple operating systems from different vendors.

Benchmark highlights
These results demonstrate that the Sun StorEdge 6920 acheives:

• Best in Class performance for multi-OS environment
• FirstMulti-OS SPC-1 Benchmark
• Best in Class price/performance
• Comparable performance to same single host environment.
• Ability to run multiple applications with a heterogeneous environment.

Furthering Sun's commitment to delivering open, heterogeneous storage systems that meet customers' price and performance demands, the Sun StorEdge 6920 midrange storage system now achieves the same best-in-class Storage Performance Council (SPC) benchmark across multiple operating systems that it achieves with a single host running the Solaris Operating System - the most storage-optimized OS in the industry.

The Sun StorEdge 6920 delivered a 35 percent higher price-performance ratio than IBM's TotalStorage FAStT900 Storage Server. Comparative results against the StorageTek D280 Disk System were also impressive, reflecting a more than 34% higher price-performance ratio. This benchmark reaffirms the Sun StorEdge 6920 as the performance market leader in the midrange storage class and reflects Sun's commitment to delivering customer value and choice across all its products and solutions.

The benchmark was performed against a real-world configuration featuring an eight-tray Sun StorEdge 6920 system in conjunction with Sun Fire 4800, 480 and V20z Servers and a Dell 2650 server, delivering best-in-class performance of 18,945.13 SPC-1 IOPS - within 3% of previous results delivered, using a single host - resulting in an SPC-1 price-performance of $12.45. From component-level evaluation to the measurement of complete distributed storage systems, SPC benchmarks provide a rigorous, audited and reliable measure of performance.

Summary and Overview

• Best-in-class performance 18,945.13 SPC-1 IOPS - within 3% of using a single host*
• Best-in-class price-performance ($12.45 $/SPC-1 IOPS) - within 3% of using a single host**
• Performed equally in a Heterogeneous environment using an array of Solaris OS products (S9, S10, S10 x86) and Windows 2003.
• Tied for best data storage ratio used:unused (over 2/3). Previous best Sun ratio also was over 2/3.

Benchmark Details
Today, Sun announces the first SPC-1 benchmark in the midrange for performance and price/performance across multiple operating systems. The StorEdge 6920 system achieved SPC-1 IOPS of 18,945.13 and SPC-1 price/performance of 12.45/SPC-1 IOPS, while simultaneously running Solaris 9, Solaris 10, Solaris 10 X-86, and Windows 2003. In September of 2004, Sun announced SPC-1 IOPS of 19,496.00 and SPC-1 price/performance of 12.10/SPC-1 IOPS while running a single Solaris 9 host with the same configuration.The SPC Benchmark-1 (SPC-1) is the first industry-standard storage benchmark and is the most comprehensive performance analysis environment ever constructed for storage subsystems.

The I/O workload in SPC-1 is characterized by predominately random I/O operations as typified by multi-user OLTP, database, and email servers environments. SPC-1 uses a highly efficient multi-threaded workload generator to thoroughly analyze direct attach or network storage subsystems. The SPC-1 benchmark enables companies to rapidly produce valid performance and price/performance results using a variety of host platforms and storage network topologies.

SPC-1 is built to:

• Provide a level playing field for test sponsors.
• Produce results that are powerful and yet simple to use.
• Provide value for engineers as well as IT consumers and solution integrators.
• Be easy to run, easy to audit/verify, and easy to use to report official results.

Additional information on the SPC-1 benchmark can be found at www.storageperformance.org/results