Santa Clara, California - September 7, 2004 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), today announced an extension of its industry leading Sun StorEdge 9000 family of products with the introduction of the Sun StorEdge 9990 system*. Sun now offers customers the next-generation technology for the data center as part of its comprehensive storage portfolio. This news further demonstrates Sun's ability to provide complete storage systems comprised of leading technologies.

"Sun delivers the complete solution to the customer: the operating system, the servers, the storage system and the management software," said Evaluator Group Senior Partner Randy Kerns. "With the new StorEdge 9990 system, Sun adds large scale consolidation that provides real economic value and great opportunity for simplification to customers seeking an end-to-end solution."

Leveraging technology from Sun's long-standing partnership with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), the Sun StorEdge 9990 system's third generation crossbar switch architecture delivers virtually unmatched performance and availability that scales with capacity and connectivity for non-disruptive growth. This innovative architecture provides higher levels of bandwidth and I/O throughput than the outdated monolithic fixed bus architectures still used by other storage vendors, including EMC.

"We partner with companies like HDS to provide best-in-class storage and data management solutions to our customers," said Mark Canepa, executive vice president of Sun Network Storage Products Group. "Combined with Sun's ability to deliver the end-to-end system and global sales and support, customers have a single source and trusted advisor for their IT needs."

With the vitualization (storage pooling), logical partitioning, and universal replication capabilities of the Sun StorEdge 9990 system, Sun offers customers the ability to increase efficiencies, simplify storage management and optimize application performance. With its addition to Sun's existing portfolio of StorEdge products, customers can now, more simply than ever, match storage needs to the application. Another benefit to customers is the unique joint support agreement with HDS that streamlines the process so they make only one call to Sun. Key Capabilities of the StorEdge 9990

• Virtually Unparalleled Performance: Delivers up to two million I/Os per second, which is five times greater than the nearest competing platform.
  
  
• Extended Capacity and Scalability: Provides a single point of control for as much as 332 terabytes of consolidated internal storage and up to 32 petabytes of externally attached storage.
  
  
• Virtualization and Logical Partitioning: Enables the aggregation of disparate storage systems into one virtual storage pool, and the creation of dedicated, independently managed partitions.
  
  
• Single Management Console: Simplifies management of all internal and external heterogeneous storage systems via a unified view using the HiCommand(R) Storage Area Management Software.
  
  
• Hundreds of Host Interfaces: Offers as many as 192 physical host interfaces and over 24,000 virtual ports which provide customers with flexibility and system expansion options.
  
  
• Universal Replication: Allows any-to-any remote copy, and enables data lifecycle management and disaster recovery.

Additionally, the Sun StorEdge 9990 is fully compatible with Sun StorEdge data management software, enabled for the Solaris Operating Environment, and certified for Sun Cluster 3.0 and 3.1.

*Editor's Note: The Sun StorEdge 9990 is the same model as Hitachi Data Systems' "Tagmastore Universal Storage Platform" or USP.

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

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun Logo, Sun StorEdge, Solaris, Sun Cluster and The Network is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc., in the United States and other countries.