Sun delivers dramatic performance increases with Solaris 2.4 for SPARC systems

Business Wire, Dec 13, 1994

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 13, 1994-- Sun Microsystems Computer Co. (SMCC) Tuesday announced it has begun shipping the new Solaris 2.4 software environment for SPARC systems, providing dramatic increases in performance and quality to all classes of Sun users.

Included with all new SPARCstation and SPARCserver systems, Solaris 2.4 increases database performance up to 30 percent, NFS throughput by 26 percent, TCP/IP throughput by 40 percent and desktop performance by 25 percent.

"Our customers have extensively tested Solaris 2.4 on the SPARC platform. They are telling us that they are impressed with the results and that this release has the highest performance and highest quality ever," said Jay Puri, vice president of product marketing for SMCC.

Increased Performance and New Capabilities

Solaris 2.4 software delivers substantial performance increases over previous versions as indicated by internal test results and industry-standard benchmarks. With its multi-threaded foundation, Solaris 2.4 software has boosted its database and NFS performance lead, increasing LADDIS network throughput by 26 percent on a SPARCcenter 2000 server from 2,575 to 3,242 operations per second.

The recent outstanding results of 2,152.60 transactions per minute (tpm) on the SPARCcenter 2000E system were obtained using Solaris 2.4 with the Informix database and were based on the Transaction Processing Performance Council Benchmark C (TPC-C). This translates into a price/performance result of $863 per tpmC.

Solaris 2.4 software also offers significantly higher desktop performance, such as text scrolling, window manipulation and graphic image display speed. Solaris 2.4 software exceeds all previous releases of Solaris 2.x and 1.x by 12 to 25 percent in overall desktop performance.

Users of Solaris 2.4 on SPARC can benefit from new features such as a journalled file system for enhanced availability and transparent overlays for faster graphics performance. Also new to the operating environment is a Motif-based GUI system installation and handicap-user keyboard support.

Co-packaged with Solaris 2.4 at no additional charge, Wabi 2.0 provides high-performance access to the most popular Microsoft Windows applications.

Leading Software Vendors Realize Significant Gains

A variety of leading independent software vendors (ISVs), from commercial database manufacturers to technical application vendors, tested the Solaris 2.4 software and realized quality and performance benefits with their applications. Further, SMCC's internal tests with OLTP benchmarks show excellent scalability up to 20 CPUs with Oracle databases.

"Real world stress testing using an Oracle Financials workload and extensive use of each other's products have allowed us to meet the demanding requirements of our broad base of mission-critical customers," said Joseph Vassallo, vice president of Sun Products Division, Oracle Corp. "Early product integration and performance tuning have created optimized versions of Oracle 7.1 and Solaris 2.4 for same-day shipment."

"Informix has used Solaris 2.4 extensively for its server development, including much of the development work for the latest release of its industry-leading parallel processing relational database, INFORMIX-OnLine Dynamic Server Version 7.1," said Tim Shetler, vice president of product management, Informix Software Inc. "We've seen substantial gains in performance and reliability with this release."

Sybase Inc. is combining its System 10 SQL Server with Sun's Solaris 2.4 to enable Sybase customers to achieve better performance from their database applications that run on SPARC systems. "Solaris 2.4 brings in a new kernel asynchronous I/O (KAIO) feature that allows our customers to run applications across their enterprise at rates up to 30 percent faster than with Solaris 2.3," said Mark Pine, senior vice president, Server and Connectivity Group, Sybase.

With Solaris 2.4, Ithaca Software, an independent division of Autodesk Inc., was able to improve the performance of its HOOPS graphics library. "Solaris 2.4 is fast and stable, definitely the best Solaris release yet," said Azhar Khan, HOOPS Device Interface (HDI) product manager, Ithaca Software.

"We can now provide our customers, consisting of over 100 commercial software developers, an increase of up to 40 percent in the performance of HOOPS on Sun systems." The recent tuning of HOOPS by Ithaca and the power of Solaris 2.4 make this possible. In addition, for the first time, the HOOPS/Solaris combination will provide Ithaca's customers access to hardware accelerated texture mapping.

Currently, there are more than 9,300 32-bit third-party software applications available for Solaris software running on hardware architectures scaling from inexpensive notebooks to multi-million dollar, 63-processor enterprise servers and supercomputers. Because the Solaris 2.4 environment is binary-compatible with previous Solaris 2.x releases, all Solaris 2.x applications will run with the new version.