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Sun Microsystems Announces Momentum for Sun Grid and Expands Grid Computing Lineup: Building a Grid Has Never Been Easier for Customers

Posted on: Tuesday, 3 May 2005, 12:00 CDT

WASHINGTON, May 3 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- During its Network Computing '05 (NC05Q2) launch today, Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced momentum for its recently introduced Sun(TM) Grid utility computing offerings and new additions to its grid computing family of products. Sun now provides customers with more options than ever before, to address their grid computing needs.

For customers who want immediate benefits from a standardized, open, grid-based computing infrastructure on a utility basis, Sun announced Sun Grid Storage Utility, as well as a sneak peek of its Sun Grid Compute Utility. For customers who want in-house grid computing environments, Sun announced the Sun Grid Rack System and the Sun Grid Solution, new offerings which include pre-integrated racks with flexible configurations for fast and easy deployment, and tailored services for architecting, implementing and managing customer grids.

"Sun Grid is being met with tremendous enthusiasm. Customers are benchmarking their data center spending and are realizing they can partner with Sun to re-allocate capital costs to take advantage of our true utility model," said Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO at Sun. "Our sites are live; and we have proof-of-concepts with financial services, oil and gas, life sciences and entertainment companies around the world. Our grid computing offerings allow them to take advantage of standardized infrastructure to drive economies of scale, resulting in better service levels, higher grades of security and better system manageability, all at a dramatically lower cost."

Sun Grid Momentum

Sun Grid lets customers more simply, predictably and reliably deliver the power of multiple resources to a single user for a specific purpose -- at the transparent price of $1(USD). Sun Grid offerings include the Sun Grid Compute Utility, a $1 (USD) per CPU per hour pay-per-use offering ($1/cpu-hr), and the Sun Grid Storage Utility, a $1 (USD) per gigabyte per month offering ($1/GB-mo). In the coming months, Sun will also roll out additional Sun Grid offerings for the desktop and developer communities. Sun today announced:

-- Regional Sun Grid Centers are now live and fully operational in

Virginia, New Jersey, and London, with customers from the financial and

education sectors. Sun plans to open more Sun Grid Centers worldwide in

the future.

-- Customer acceptance: High profile banks and entertainment companies

have completed extensive testing for Sun Grid. Sun will announce more

details of these customer wins in the near future.

-- Further details on its Sun Grid Storage Utility, a high-performance

storage offering to support customers' compute grid jobs, or to be used

to support their data storage needs at a price of $1/GB-mo. Customers

get secure Internet data replication and recovery; 24x7 access to

offsite storage; and unlimited scalability. The Sun Grid Storage

Utility includes fully integrated hardware, software and services,

provided by Sun. The utility is managed and serviced by Sun experts

24x7 and Sun also offers continuous service improvements. Scheduled

availability of Sun Grid Storage Utility is Summer 2005.

-- Customers and partners can now sign up for the Sun Grid Compute Utility

"sneak peek program," an early access program for pre-qualified Sun

customers to test their applications for compatibility and performance

on the Sun Grid. Additionally, their feedback will be incorporated into

the commercially available offering to be released this Summer.

Sun Grid Rack System and Sun Grid Solution

In addition, Sun is expanding its offerings to provide solutions to a wide spectrum of grid computing needs.

-- The new Sun Grid Rack System makes it easier for customers to deploy

powerful grids. It uses building blocks like Sun Fire(TM) servers with

x64 processors and Sun software, in pre-integrated racks with flexible

configurations, for rapid and low-risk deployment. The Sun Grid Rack

System, starting at approximately $77,000 (USD), is delivered through

Sun's Customer Ready System (CRS) program.

-- Sun also offers the new Sun Grid Solution, a range of tailored services

to help architect, implement and manage a grid solution using Sun

technology and expertise. By enabling the rapid deployment of tested

grid architectures, the Sun Grid Solution enables customers to engage

with Sun Services to address critical business problems, including:

system utilization, time-to-results and return-on-assets.

To date, an increasing number of government agencies and enterprise customers, such as: the Bank of Montreal, Idaho National Laboratories (INL) and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) among others, have embraced grid computing solutions from Sun.

INL has deployed a grid environment including racks of Sun servers based on AMD-Opteron(TM) processors. INL's High Performance Computing Architect, Eric Greenwade, reported that work was being accomplished within 28 hours of delivery. "The Sun Grid Rack System looks like a winning proposition. When we used Sun's CRS program for deploying our grid environment, the racks practically came off the truck running -- we were able to have the entire eight-rack cluster up and submitting jobs within two days," explains Greenwade. "All we had to do was hook it up to power and to our network, load the systems, and we were ready to go."

More information about Sun's grid computing products is available at http://www.sun.com/grid.

Sun's NC05Q2 Web event is available at: http://www.sun.com/nc/05q2. More information on today's announcements, including full press releases and product details, can be viewed at Sun's online press kit: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/networkcomputing05q2/.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer (TM)" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. 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/ .

NOTE: Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, Sun Grid, Sun Fire 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 US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Contact: Brett Smith, +1-415-294-5059, or brett.smithsun.com, or Liza Curran +1-310-943-6865, or liza.curran@sun.com, both of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

CONTACT: Brett Smith, +1-415-294-5059, or brett.smithsun.com, or LizaCurran +1-310-943-6865, or liza.curran@sun.com, both of Sun Microsystems,Inc.

Web site: http://sun.com/

Source: PRNewswire-FirstCall

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