Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced that several customers are seeing major benefits in performance and investment protection with the new UltraSPARC(r) IV and Solaris platform-based Sun Fire mid-range and high-end systems. Additionally, Sun has overtaken the competition with new superior benchmark results gained from the tremendous throughput performance of the new systems.

"From long-term high performance computing research projects to mission-critical data centers in enterprise environments, our customers want to know their investments will be protected as well as having enterprise systems that can be maintained and improved without any downtime," said Clark Masters, executive vice president, Enterprise Systems Products, Sun Microsystems. "These new throughput computing systems add to generations of Sun's 64-bit, UltraSPARC- and Solaris platform-based machines that plug and play into data center environments and now deliver up to twice the performance."

The Boeing Company, the world's leading aerospace company, is the largest manufacturer of satellites, commercial jetliners and military aircraft, with revenues over $50 billion last year. In its high performance and technical computing (HPTC) environment, Boeing has been using equipment from Sun Microsystems to power its secure high-speed information processing systems. Recently the company upgraded to UltraSPARC IV technology from Sun to boost performance.

"Sun is a valued technical partner because they provide innovative solutions while protecting our current investments. We just received the new UltraSPARC IV processors which demonstrate a significant performance boost with no impact to our applications. This is one of the reasons why Sun has been a long-term technical partner," said Michael Mott, Information Systems Architect, Technical Fellow of The Boeing Company.

World Record Throughput Performance

Sun systems continue to set impressive benchmarks for the UltraSPARC IV-based throughput computing systems, demonstrating superiority in performance over the competition. Measuring sustainable memory bandwidth, the Sun Fire(tm) E25K server recently reached over 68 GB/s memory bandwidth as measured by the STREAM(COPY) "standard" benchmark.* This result was over twice the performance attained by the IBM p690 which delivered 34 GB/s. This benchmark demonstrates the measure of copy performance which is important to many commercial applications as well as memory-intensive HPTC applications.

In the commercial marketplace, Sun has established the world record 36-processor, two-tier SAP R/3 4.70 Standard Sales and Distribution benchmark. This SAP-SD test, which used the Oracle 9i Database on a Sun Fire E20K system, supported 5,050 users and was more than 25 percent faster than the 1.5 GHz Itanium2-based server which ran version 4.70.

Another commercial world record on the Manugistics NetWORKS Fulfillment v7.1 supply chain management (SCM) application for the retail industry supported 30 million SKUs per hour. The Sun Fire E6900 system was 1.97 times faster than a competitive UNIX system, providing a marked advantage for enterprises managing inventories.

This new family of Sun Fire mid-range to high-end systems were all announced in February. They combine the advances of throughput computing processor technology and SMP architecture, the Solaris 10 Operating System, Sun Java Enterprise System and multithreaded application support. These new systems tightly integrate on-chip capabilities with the operating system to enable customers to mix and match UltraSPARC III and UltraSPARC IV processors in their systems, nearly doubling data center performance at a fraction of the cost of competitive systems. The throughput computing server family includes the Sun Fire E2900, E4900, E6900, E20K and E25K servers, all powered by chip multithreading (CMT) technology of the UltraSPARC IV processor.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) 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

Notes:
*The 1.05 GHz Sun Fire E25K server delivers 68 GB/s, where the 1.7 GHz IBM p690 delivers 34 GB/s of delivered memory bandwidth. Comparison results from http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/standard/Bandwidth.html as of 2/10/04.

Two-tier SAP R/3 Enterprise 4.70 Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark Sun Fire E20K: 5,050 benchmark users. 36 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC IV processors, 288 GB, Oracle 9i, Solaris 9 Operating System. NEC 5800 1320Xd, 4,030 benchmark users, 32 Itanium2 processors, 256 GB, SQL Server 2000. Benchmark performance data as published on http://www.sap.com/benchmark/ as of 02/10/04.

Manugistics NetWORKS Fulfillment 7.1, 30 Million stock keeping units (SKUs) per hour. IBM results: http://www.manugistics.com/news/detail.asp?id=471

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun Logo, Solaris, Sun Fire, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.