Boosts MENA market share by introducing the most open and versatile enterprise Blade platform

Dubai, UAE - August 29, 2007 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) is set to lead the Blade server market within the next three years, the company disclosed today at the launch of its latest offering - the Sun Blade™6000. The company has dominated the enterprise space, especially the Telcom industry with its market leading Sparc servers, with all major telco's under its belt. The latest launch is aimed at further expanding Sun's market into the volume space, specifically the mid-market, Oil & Gas, Retail, and Finance sectors.

The new Sun Blade™ 6000 will redefine the datacenter lifecycle with up to double the memory and Input/Output capacity of competing blades and rackmount servers. The new platform is expected to accelerate the growth in Sun's regional market share, as Sun enters the x86 Blade market.

The Sun Blade™ 6000  offers a choice of blades powered by the UltraSPARC® T1 processor with CoolThreads™ technology, Intel® Xeon® processors or AMD Opteron™ processors, allowing customers to deploy the industry's broadest range of applications ranging from database, web tier and high performance computing (HPC) on a single common modular design.

"Sun is making its foray into the regional Blade market with the launch of the new Sun Blade™ 6000, to meet customer demand for a more versatile system. By partnering with Intel and AMD, we are forging ahead and reinforcing our commitment to our customers by offering them more choice," Craig Vintcent, systems practice manager - MENA, Sun Microsystems.

The Sun Blade™ 6000 Modular System will provide Sun customers in the Middle East and Africa region with the most superior flexibility of any blade platform. In addition to using the industry's highest-performing microprocessors from Sun, Intel and AMD, it provides support for Solaris™, Windows and Linux operating systems, as well as greater memory capacity and more I/O bandwidth.

"The Sun Blade™ 6000 is the first Intel product that we are offering businesses in the region, and it will allow them to consolidate and streamline varying computing workloads cost-effectively," said Basil Ayass, MENA x64 Product Manager for Sun Microsystems. "Within the first week of its availability, we have already received significant orders from regional customers. This demand has set the momentum for Sun to lead the Blade market in the next three years. With the new platform now available, we expect to accelerate our market share and cater to organisations' rising demands for virtualisation and consolidation. The new platform will enable regional organisations to consolidate all of their existing hardware and applications on any operating system effortlessly."

The Sun Blade™ 6000 has been designed to maximise customer investment by supporting microprocessors with two, four, and eight cores. All this enables the Sun Blade™ 6000 to run virtually any enterprise application. The Sun Blade™ 6000 can be any company's universal deployment platform.

With the three fastest processor platforms, a choice of operating systems, the most memory and I/O bandwidth, Sun is delivering a new system that prevents customers from having to make sacrifices in order to move to a blade platform. With the Sun Blade™ 6000 Sun is now offering the broadest support of volume architecture and operating systems in the industry - combined with energy efficiency.

As the industry's most open blade platform, the Sun Blade™ 6000 easily integrates into existing datacenter infrastructure and management systems, without requiring proprietary I/O, proprietary management or hidden licensing costs. System features and support for the Solaris 10 OS, Windows and Linux ensure optimal performance today, while allowing customers to scale for future growth without forklift upgrades.

The Sun Blade™ 6000 also packs a performance punch with its comprehensive choice of versatile server modules. Regardless of the underlying microprocessor architecture, the innovative system design combined with the latest capabilities of the Sun Studio 12 software propels these new blades to the top of industry-recognized Java, HPC and compute-intensive benchmarks.

The Sun Blade™ 6000 Modular System includes the following components and features:

  • Sun Blade™ 10 RU chassis: Supports up to 10 blades per chassis, in addition to up to 320 cores, 2.5 terabytes (TB) of memory and five Tbps usable I/O throughput per rack

  • Sun Blade T6300 server module: 1-socket blade powered by an UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology

  • Sun Blade X6250 server module: 2-socket blade powered by Quad-Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor 5300 series, representing Sun's first Intel Xeon-based product since Sun and Intel announced their strategic alliance last January, and Sun's first Intel-based quad-core product

  • Sun Blade X6220 server module: 2-socket blade powered by Second-Generation AMD Opteron processors

  • No-compromise power and cooling technology: Delivers optimized cooling and airflow, resulting in higher systems reliability and power efficiency

  • Open Industry Standard I/O: Leverages industry standard PCI-Express  I/O architecture and adapters, allowing customers to install or replace an I/O module without interfering with systems operation

  • Open transparent management: Supports the most standard interfaces to facilitate fast and easy integration into customers' existing blade or rackmount management infrastructure, whether those management tools are from Sun or other vendors.

-Ends-

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network is the Computer" -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, Sun Blade, CoolThreads, Solaris 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 United States and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Opteron and combinations thereof are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

Media Contacts:  
Amber Dale
The Portsmouth Group
Tel:- +971 4 369 3574
Amber.dale@theportsmouthgroup.com

© Press Release 2007