Sun Customers Shine With Datacenter Deployment of Sun Fire 'CoolThreads' Servers Powered by the Solaris 10 Operating System

January 19, 2007; 05:25 AM
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced three new customers-Vonage, PlanetOut, and Concentric.com-representing a diverse set of businesses in which the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) have been successfully deployed. The customers are using the servers, which are powered by Sun's UltraSPARC(R) T1 processor with CoolThreads technology, to drive a variety of applications, from running enterprise databases to supporting web-tier applications.

"Sun has hit a home run with the combination of Solaris 10 running on the UltraSPARC T1-based servers," said Tom Cignarella, senior director of technical operations at Planet Out Inc. "The performance is outstanding, and updated features like Solaris Containers which allow us to create zones are easy to set up yet extremely powerful. We were able to replace nearly 300 aging servers with 20 Sun Fire T1000's and we have greater capacity than before. The T1000 has no competition at this time, and what Sun has done makes other new servers seem outdated."

Customer Deployments

Concentric.com: Providing highly scalable business web hosting, email hosting, groupware and perimeter email security that cost-effectively meets the needs of today’s growing businesses.

Concentric.com has currently deployed nine Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 servers. Each server increases capacity six to eight times over the previous generation of hardware that it replaces. As a result, they have purchased five additional systems. Concentric's aggressively multi-threaded and thread-pooled software runs very well on the 16 'processor' configurations helping Concentric.com achieve near linear performance gains.

PlanetOut Inc.: The leading global media and entertainment company exclusively serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

PlanetOut replaced 300 older systems with 20 Sun Fire T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 OS. The performance gains have been dramatic, and since Planetout was running out of datacenter room, the space gains have been equally important. Although the power and cooling benefits and the Solaris Containers feature were not initial drivers of the purchase, they have proven as important, if not more so, than the performance gains.

Vonage: A leading provider of broadband telephone services with over two million subscriber lines as of September 30, 2006.

Over the last year, Vonage has deployed both Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 operating system to power its ticketing system for managing customer support. With the Sun systems, Vonage is experiencing a dramatic savings in power and cooling, is using 50 percent less space, and can now support significantly more users per servers. Given its widely acknowledged reliability and long-standing dominance in the telecommunications industry, Solaris was an obvious OS choice for Vonage.

Momentum

The Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers, available for just over a year, are two of the fastest ramping products in Sun's history. Combined they represent more than $100 million in revenue per fiscal quarter, and have played a key role in helping Sun achieve three straight quarters of server revenue growth, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.

"The T1000 and T2000 are key pistons in our growth engine – delivering virtually unmatched performance and energy efficiency vs. the competition, delivering a range of benefits for customers, and providing a vehicle for us to enter new accounts," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Sun Microsystems. "With the reliability and scalability of Solaris 10, these machines are winning new customers for Sun every day."

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.