Sun Microsystems Extends Open Storage Revolution With New Industry-Leading, High-Performance Product Lines

Business Wire, July 9, 2008

Unveils Sun Storage J4000 Family and New High-Performance Sun Fire X4540 System to Deliver Breakthrough Economics for Growing Open Storage Market

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) today announced the further expansion of its industry leading Open Storage portfolio with the introduction of a new line of economical storage arrays and a new highly efficient, high-performance addition to the popular Sun Fire(TM) X4500 "Thumper" family. The new Sun(TM) Storage J4000 product line becomes the industry's most scalable and reliable storage building blocks and offers a 10x savings over traditional arrays when combined with Sun's industry leading servers, OpenSolaris(TM) operating system and Solaris(TM) ZFS. Sun also introduced the Sun Fire(TM) X4540 storage server version of the award-winning Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper" system that offers the industry's highest storage density and 30-50 percent in power and cooling savings at one-half the price versus traditional storage. The industry is fast waking to the Open Storage revolution: Download free Open Storage software and learn more at www.sun.com/openstorage

The total market for Open Storage is expected to surpass $10 billion by 2010 and the low-end storage market will grow at a CAGR of almost 23% over the next three years, driven in large part by the flexibility and breakthrough economics presented by open source software running on general purpose storage systems and arrays. Sun is the first major vendor to recognize this shift and took steps ahead to add industry leading storage services and data protection functions to Solaris ZFS, introduce the world's first hybrid server and storage platform in the Sun Fire X4500 family and also create the world's first Open Storage community within OpenSolaris.

"Our portfolio of Open Storage platforms has expanded with the addition of Sun's new Sun Storage J4000 family and an addition to our high-performance, high-value Sun Fire X4500 Thumper systems," said John Fowler, executive vice-president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "These new building blocks deliver impressive density and capacity while empowering customers to take advantage of the efficiencies of general purpose storage powered by open source software." Please hear John Fowler talk more about how these products fit into the Open Storage industry here: http://sunfeedroom.sun.com/?fr_story=FRdamp281480&rf=bm

Customers, Partners Love Saving Money with Open Storage

PixelPark AG, Oregon State University, IT.com and Manukau Institute of Technology were among the first customers to see the flexibility and breakthrough economics of Sun's new Sun Storage J4000 family. In fact, these companies reported even greater cost savings through the use of Sun Fire servers and Solaris operating system. Please see more about customers and Open Storage here: http://www.sun.com/customers/testimonials/jbod.jsp

German IT infrastructure services leader PixelPark AG is an early access customer to the new Sun Storage J4000 platform. "With the Sun Storage J4000 arrays, our hard costs are very low -- less than $1 per gigabyte for our bulk storage applications -- while also delivering solid performance," said Thorleif Wiik, IT Director, Pixelpark AG. "Its high-density drives also conserve valuable rack space. And it works with multiple systems, which means we can better mix and match components as our business needs change. This product clearly reflects Sun's commitment to innovation in Open Storage."

Long-time Sun customer Oregon State University looks to Sun to support oceanic observatories that require large continuous streams of complex, multi-dimensional data and a new approach to managing storage.

"The Sun Storage J4500 array offers us high reliability, fast performance, and simple IT management. For example, now we don't have to reconfigure the underlying storage devices when we add disks to our Solaris ZFS-based storage pool, so the J4500 array's full capacity is immediately available. This solution demonstrates Sun's Open Storage leadership, bringing together the best advantages of open-source software and industry-standard hardware," said Chuck Sears, Manager Research Computing, College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University.

Sun Leapfrogs Competition with New Sun Storage J4000 Family

Sun delivers breakthrough economics for the Sun Storage J4000 family when combined with Sun's industry leading servers. With the best price/performance for a disk array, J4000 has over twice the performance/$ of the next best competitor per SPC-1(1). The Sun Storage J4000 family is also the industry's most scalable and reliable with up to two times the storage density, three times the connectivity, two times the availability and up to 10 times more available capacity than traditional low end storage products.

In addition, this new family offers customers a very cost effective $3000 starting price and breakthrough pricing below $1 per GB for bulk storage applications. Additionally, the industry leading high density with up to twelve drives per rack unit, the Sun Storage J4000 family saves precious rack space. When used with OpenSolaris and industry leading servers from Sun, storage costs are reduced by up to 90%. Also, unlike traditional storage deployments, Sun Open Storage environments allow customers to freely mix and match components and re-use hardware by adding new software as their business needs change.