SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 30, 2005 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) announced a world record-breaking data warehousing performance TPC-H SF10000 benchmark result with the Sun Fire E25K UltraSPARC(R) IV+ system and the Oracle(R) Database 10g Release 2, which outperformed the performance and price/performance of recent results from HP and IBM. Sun also announced today a world record-breaking performance SPECjbb2005 benchmark result with the Sun Fire E6900 UltraSPARC IV+ system which eclipsed newly announced SPECjbb2005 result from IBM based on comparably priced Power5 system. Sun achieved a SPECjbb2005 result of 248,075 business operations per second (bops), which beats the performance of the newly announced POWER5 IBM eServer p5 570 16-way SPECjbb2005 result of 244,361 bops.(2)

The Sun Fire E25K system's world record surpassed a HP Integrity Superdome cluster by 25 percent, and an IBM POWER5-based cluster by over 4 percent on the TPC-H 10 Terabyte benchmark. (1) The 72-way 1.5 Ghz UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based Sun Fire E25K system with 108 Sun StorEdge SE3510 arrays running the industry-leading Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and Oracle Database 10g Release 2 resulted in 108,099.7 QphH@10000GB, at a world record price-performance ratio of $53.80/QphH@10000GB, with the TPC-H SF10000 benchmark.

These results demonstrate the continued dominance of Sun UltraSPARC-based systems and Solaris OS on large SMP platforms and Oracle Database 10g with the most demanding enterprise application environments. Bolstered by Solaris 10, Sun's advanced multi-platform, open source OS, and new Sun Studio 11 software compilers, the E25K is further optimized for record-setting performance and throughput maximization. The system was able to deliver 20 GB/sec I/O bandwidth which demonstrates the capability of Solaris 10 and the StorEdge 3510 array to deliver real world I/O performance.

The TPC-H Benchmark

The Transaction Processing Performance Council's (TPC) TPC-H benchmark measures systems' capability to examine large volumes of data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and give answers to critical business questions. TPC-H evaluates a composite performance metric (QphH@size) and a price/performance metric ($/QphH@size) that measure the performance of various decision support systems by the execution of sets of queries against a standard database under controlled conditions.

The Specjbb Benchmark

SPECjbb2005 (Java Business Benchmark) measures the performance of a Java implemented application tier (server-side Java) based on the order processing in a wholesale supplier application. It also measures the performance of CPUs, caches, memory hierarchy and the scalability of shared memory processors (SMPs). The metrics given are number of bops (Business Operations per Second) and bops/Java Virtual Machine .

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

A singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world's most important markets. Sun's philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

As of November 29, 2005
(1)Sun Fire E25K+ 108,099,7 QphH@10000GB, $53.809/QphH@10000GB, avail 01/23/06, IBM p5 575 104,100.1 QphH@10000GB, $61.17/QphH@10000GB, avail 08/15/05, HP Integrity Superdome cluster 86,282.7 QphH@10000GB, $161.24/QphH@10000GB, avail 04/06/05, HP Integrity Superdome 49,104.5 QphH@10000GB, $118.13/QphH@10000GB, avail 03/25/04. TPC-H, QphH, $/QphH tm of Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). More info www.tpc.org.
(2) SPECjbb2005 Sun Fire E6900 (16-way, 16 chips, 32 cores) 248,075 bops, 31,009 bops/JVM submitted for review, IBM eServer p5 570 (8 chips, 16 cores, 16-way) 244,361 bops, 30,545 bops/JVM . SPEC, SPECjbb reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results as of 11/23/05 on www.spec.org unless otherwise noted.

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