SUN Sees Increased Demand For Its Total Network Computing Solutions Anchored By SUN Fire 15K Server

New Deals with Office Depot, Pemex, and Science Application International Corporation Highlight Rise in Demand for End-to-End Infrastructure Solutions From Sun

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Thursday, January 29, 2004; 12:00 AM

SANTA CLARA, Calif.– January 29, 2004 – Demonstrating the increasing demand for complete network computing system solutions, Sun announced today it has secured major deals with several industry-leading businesses and organizations that are looking to manage ever-changing workload needs with high-end servers. In addition to a comprehensive agreement with Office Depot, Sun has signed on Pemex, Morse plc and Science Application International Corporation.

"Despite our recent diversification into low-cost systems, these wins are a testament that high-end servers matter for today's data-intensive jobs," said Steve Campbell, vice president of marketing, Enterprise Systems Product Group at Sun. "Customers want computing infrastructures that can seamlessly scale up or scale down as demand warrants, while simultaneously lowering costs and improving efficiencies. Sun brings together the Solaris operating system, storage and services with the Sun Fire 15K to build a fully integrated high-end solution tailored to the customer's needs."

Customers Do More With Sun Systems

Petroleos Mexicanos' (Pemex) Exploration and Production Division turned to Sun to build a data center infrastructure that delivers exceptional power and performance to help geologists, geophysicists, and engineers gain critical information for finding, producing and managing Mexico's oil and gas reservoirs. Sun, the creator of and leading advocate of Java technology, designed a complete end-to-end solution based on the Sun Fire 15K server running the Solaris 8 Operating System featuring:

A storage area network (SAN) comprised of Sun's tiered classes of storage from entry to high end with traction in software.

Two Sun Blade 2000 workstations that serve as consoles for the Sun Fire 15K server and storage solution.

A SunReady Availability Assessment and Application Readiness Service performed by Sun Services providing recommendations to optimize the company's new data center.
"By switching to Sun Fire servers, we have deployed a large-capacity, highly available and powerful system to help quickly and reliably process a vast amount of data," said Fernando Fiorentino, technical manager of Pemex's Centro Nacional de Procesado Sismologico (CNPS). "The Sun team has worked very closely with us to deliver the most effective environment to meet our heavy data processing and storage needs. We are very impressed with the performance of our Sun equipment and the expertise of the Sun team."

U.K.-based Morse, a systems integrator and Sun iForce partner specializing in application performance evaluation, asked Sun to create a server environment capable of simultaneously handling myriad projects for Morse clients with minimal downtime. Morse created an environment running on the Solaris Operating System that includes the Sun Fire 15K server, two Sun Fire 1280 servers and the Sun Enterprise 10000 server. This allows customers to do proof-of-concept tests to ensure that proposed solutions meet evolving business requirements. Using the Dynamic Reconfiguration capabilities of the Sun servers, Morse can automatically provision resources and maximize efficiency to accommodate varying workloads and demands on processing power.

"We have developed a framework to guide our customers towards business aligned IT. The Sun Fire and Sun Enterprise systems are key components of the iForce Center which provides us a with significant differentiator when helping our customers achieve more from less," said David Beresford, UK Country Director for Morse plc. "By providing a proof of concept environment our customers can ensure the proposed solution is aligned to their business needs."

Sun's High-End Systems Earn Critical Acclaim

Further validating the superior technology of Sun's high-end servers, China InformationWeek in December 2003 awarded the Sun Fire 15K server its Editors Choice 2003 award for its massive scalability (up to 106 CPUs), high performance on CPU and I/O throughputs, and dynamic system domain technology, which provides the most flexible configurations for different types of workloads.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com

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Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Sun Fire, Sun Blade, Sun StorEdge, SunReady, Solaris, Java, iForce and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.