Sun Showcases Next Generation Open Petascale Computing and Storage at Supercomputing 2007

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced two new systems designed to address the extreme computation, scale and storage requirements of today's HPC customer. The Sun Constellation System - the world's first open petascale computing environment - combines ultra-dense, high performance compute, networking, storage and software into an integrated general purpose system. Running the Solaris Operating System (OS), Linux and Windows, the Sun Constellation System is capable of scaling from departmental clusters to the largest supercomputer configurations to help customers to solve complex computational problems. The Sun StorageTek 5800 System is designed to help ensure long-term preservation, protection and integrity of massive data stores with extensive metadata facilities.


"With today's announcements, we've designed and are delivering the next big thing – open compute and storage platforms in an extremely scalable architecture that brings the power of industrial grade computing to department level clusters and all the way up to the petaflop environments," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems.



Sun will demonstrate a range of HPC products, services and solutions from servers to software to file systems to storage and archival tape at the Supercomputing 2007 conference in Reno, NV, as well as the systems announced today:

Sun Constellation System

The Sun Constellation System is the world's most scalable HPC computing architecture based on open standards and industry standard components. Scaling from departmental level clusters to systems capable of petascale level computing, the system features ultra-dense compute nodes, ultra-dense Infiniband switching and high performance storage.

Sun Constellation System comprises the following innovative components, bringing production-ready capabilities to petascale computing:

Sun Blade 6048 Modular System - An ultra dense blade server platform which supports SPARC, AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors and runs industry standard OS'es including Solaris and Linux.
Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 - world's first single chassis switch designed for petascale, delivers 12x the capacity of the largest Infiniband switch available today, enables the Sun Constellation System to require 1/6 the number of cables of competitive systems and simplifies the design and management of high performance clusters by reducing the number of Infiniband switching elements by up to 300:1.
High-throughput, high-density storage and high capacity tape archive in a unique end-to-end hierarchical storage solution with automated and seamless transfer supporting optimal placement of data.
New Sun Datacenter Express Services for HPC that can be combined with factory integration services and design through Sun's Customer Ready program provide a comprehensive, all-in-one systems and services solution that takes the cost and complexity out of HPC infrastructure procurement and management.
To learn more about the Sun Constellation System go to: www.sun.com/sunconstellationsystem

The Sun Constellation System will be demonstrated on-stage at the Sun Microsystems booth 514 at 11:00 a.m. PST on both Tuesday, Nov. 13 and Thursday, Nov. 15.

Sun StorageTek 5800 System

The Sun StorageTek 5800 System is a new category of storage system designed for large-scale storage of fixed data. The first commercially available fixed content storage system with a commitment to open source its code, the Sun StorageTek 5800 System helps ensure long-term accessibility to data and delivers simpler deployment and management capabilities than traditional file/block-based storage. The Sun StorageTek 5800 System allows customers to scale seamlessly, saving millions in administrative costs. Designed for long-term preservation and protection of data assets, the system helps protect against data corruption and loss with advanced data integrity functionality and assurances.

Check out the market's positive response to the Sun StorageTek 5800 System: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-11/sunflash.20071112.2.xml

To learn more about the Sun StorageTek 5800 System: http://www.sun.com/storagetek/disk_systems/enterprise/5800/index.xml

The Sun StorageTek 5800 system will be demonstrated on-stage at the Sun Microsystems booth 514 at 3:00 p.m. PST on Tuesday, Nov. 13.

Sun at Supercomputing 2007

For more information on Sun Constellation System and the other innovative products that Sun is showcasing at Supercomputing 2007, including ROCKS on Solaris, Solaris for HPC, the Lustre Parallel File System and the new HPC Developer Community on OpenSolaris.org, visit: www.sun.com/hpc or visit the Sun booths# 514 and #2840 at Supercomputing 2007 for live demonstrations. Sun's Supercomputing 2007 online press kit can be found at: www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/2007-1112/index.jsp.

Sun Donates High Availability Cluster Code to the Open Source Community, Enables Accelerated Innovation In Scale Out Architectures

Sun Microsystems, Inc., (NASDAQ: SUNW), announced it will release the Solaris Cluster source code through the HA (High Availability) Clusters community on the OpenSolaris community. For the first time, developers will be able to participate in the evolution of the software itself, as well as leverage the open source cluster technology to develop and support highly available application services.


"Sun is releasing this code to the community to accelerate innovation around clustered solutions, in a world moving quickly to scale-out architectures. When applied to Solaris or other technologies, the Solaris clustering code is a great base to support clustered and HA systems innovation throughout the community," said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "The Open HA Cluster code allows open source developers to use the same Solaris HA infrastructure that powers enterprises' most mission critical applications with their open source and network facing applications and services."

Sun's first contributions are application modules, or agents, which enable open source or commercially available applications to become highly available in a cluster environment.

The Open HA Cluster code will be made available in three phases, beginning at the end of June and continuing over the next 18 months. In the first phase of Open HA Cluster, Sun will deliver code for most of the high availability agents offered with the Solaris Cluster product. Solaris Cluster's high availability agents allow developers to cluster-enable applications to run as either scalable or failover services. Sun is also making available the source code for the Solaris Cluster Automated Test Environment (SCATE) along with agent related documentation, to assist in testing new agents. The test framework and first test suite will be contributed at the end of June 2007. Among these agents are the Solaris Containers agent, the BEA Weblogic agent, and PostgreSQL.

Agents written using Open HA Cluster will also run on Solaris Cluster version 3.2 on the Solaris 10 OS. Subsequent phases of Open HA Cluster will include delivery of the code for the recently released Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition - software that enables multi-site disaster recovery by managing the availability of application services and data across geographically dispersed clusters. Later, Sun will release the code for the core Solaris Cluster infrastructure, again with SCATE infrastructure tests and documentation.

To learn more about Open High Availability Cluster and the HA Clusters community on OpenSolaris, and to review a complete list of the high availability agents offered with the Solaris Cluster product, please visit: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ha-clusters/

In the two years since Sun first opened the source code of the Solaris software development build, the OpenSolaris project community has grown worldwide. More about the achievements of the OpenSolaris community can be found at http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/opensolaris_at_two

Sun offers a tiered set of support services for its software offerings, ranging from single incident to comprehensive developer plans. In addition, with a broad portfolio of training and certification offerings, developers can enhance their skillsets to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies. To learn more, please visit http://developers.sun.com/services

SUNW: Sun Tunes Solaris Express Developer Edition for Enhanced Multicore Development

Sun Microsystems, Inc., (NASDAQ: SUNW), today announced new functionality for Solaris Express Developer Edition, including new compilers and development tools, to help application developers create better applications faster. The OpenSolaris-based distribution offers developers for the Solaris Operating System (OS), Java platform, and Web 2.0 applications a new set of products which are optimized for the newest multicore architectures. Solaris Express Developer Edition was created using the most current OpenSolaris community source code contributions and includes Sun Studio 12 software to accelerate application performance by parallelizing C, C++, and Fortran applications.


"Software developers increasingly demand innovative platforms and tools to allow their applications to take maximum advantage of multi-core chip architectures, such as the market-leading 32-thread Sun UltraSPARC T1. The new threading tools and compiler optimizations in Sun Studio 12 provide an advanced suite of tools and libraries that ease the development of applications on the newest multi-core SPARC and x86-based systems," said Marc Hamilton, vice president of Solaris marketing for Sun. "Coupled with the advantages of the underlying platform, the Solaris OS provides leadership in the development and deployment of next generation multicore applications."

The new release of Solaris Express Developer Edition offers a modern GNOME-based desktop including Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0 beta 2, and StarOffice 8 update 6 software. In addition, this update includes NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) 5.5 for the development of desktop, web, and enterprise Java applications. Sun Studio 12 includes auto parallelizing compilers and support for the OpenMP 2.5 API, and has a new feature that identifies at runtime many common but difficult-to-detect multithreading issues, such as race and deadlock conditions. Combined with a next-generation IDE, Sun Studio 12 software offers a complete, integrated, easy-to-use toolchain for those that develop for the most advanced OS on the planet.

Sun Studio 12 software uses innovative optimization techniques on x86 systems to deliver up to 25% better performance on compute-intensive benchmarks, and up to 80% better performance for memory-intensive, industry-recognized benchmarks.

Additional functionality includes new wireless drivers, the first phase of a project to automatically configure network interfaces, new Xorg server enhancements and new X windows libraries, plus a DTrace provider to allow tracing X client applications.

Solaris Express Developer Edition supports a wide variety of common x86-based desktop and laptop hardware, and has been optimized for servers being developed based on Sun's 64-thread Niagara 2 processor. The Sun Blade 6000 blade server supports SPARC, AMD Opteron and Intel processors running Solaris Express Developer Edition, the industry leading developer OS for those processors.

Solaris Express Developer Edition 5/07 is available to download today at www.sun.com/sxde and is the second iteration of a new distribution based on the OpenSolaris project, providing developers with a fully integrated environment for developing applications for Solaris, Java technology, and Web 2.0. Solaris Express Developer Edition offers simplified installation so developers can get Solaris up and running more easily, saving time and effort, and Sun Developer Expert Assistance is available for developers to can get coding advice and learn best practices for development. Solaris Express Developer Edition is being developed in the OpenSolaris community, and Sun plans to release regular updates with additional capabilities and ease of use enhancements.

Sun Introduces The Most Open And Versatile Enterprise Blade Platform

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today introduced the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System, which redefines the datacenter lifecycle with up to double the memory and double the I/O capacity of competing blades and rackmount servers. The Sun Blade 6000 Modular System 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 virtualization, database, web tier and high performance computing (HPC) on a single common modular design.


The Sun Blade 6000 Modular System provides customers the most versatility of any blade platform. It uses the industry's highest performing microprocessors from Sun, Intel and AMD, and provides support for Solaris, Windows and Linux operating systems. Its increased memory capacity and I/O bandwidth makes Sun Blade 6000 the optimal virtualization platform, enabling it to support large memory configurations at half the cost. In addition, the new systems have been designed to maximize customer investment by supporting microprocessors with four and eight cores. All this enables the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System to run virtually any enterprise application.

"With the three fastest processor platforms, three operating systems, the most memory and I/O bandwidth, Sun is delivering a system that enables customers to upgrade to virtualized blade platforms without the expense or technical compromises presented by all our competitors," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Sun Systems Group. "We are now offering the broadest support of volume architecture and operating systems in the industry - combined with the energy efficiency. The Sun Blade 6000 can be anyone's universal deployment platform."

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 Modular System includes the following components and features:

• Sun Blade 10 RU chassis: Supports up to 10 blades per chassis with up to four chassis per rack for a full capacity of 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 quad-core ready blade powered by Quad-Core Intel Xeon 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 quad-core based 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

Early access and beta customers such as College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University and the University of Notre Dame have begun to test and implement Sun Blade 6000 Modular Systems in their datacenters. For quotes and more details on customer and ISV support of the Sun Blade 6000, please visit: http://sun.com/servers/blades/perspectives.jsp

Sun Blade Server Modules Set Multiple New World Records on a Broad Range of Industry Standard Benchmarks

The Sun Blade 6000 Modular System 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 running on top of the Solaris 10 OS propelled these new blades to the top of industry-recognized Java, HPC and compute-intensive benchmarks. Additional details on these record-breaking results can be found at: http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/6000/benchmarks

Sun Refresh Service: Build an "Always Fresh" Datacenter

The Sun Refresh Service now includes the Sun Blade X6220 Server Module, allowing customers to reach maximum performance and efficiency from their datacenters on an ongoing basis at half the cost of traditional acquisition methods. Future support is planned for the other server modules. The subscription service program includes installation of the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System with server modules, plus three refreshes of server modules over a 42-month period. Customers receive automatic upgrades to the latest blade architecture as soon as it becomes available. For more information on the Sun Refresh Service, please visit: http://www.sun.com/refreshservice. For information on additional Sun services and solutions that help datacenters and Sun Blade servers optimize their performance and efficiency, please visit: http://www.sun.com/services

Availability and Pricing

The Sun Blade 6000 Modular System is available now, with entry-level pricing starting at $4,995 for the Sun Blade 6000 Chassis; $5,995 per server module for the Sun Blade T6300; $3,695 per server module for the Sun Blade X6250; and $3,995 per server module for the Sun Blade X6220. For more information on the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System, including pricing, availability and promotions, please visit: http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/6000/

Sun Microsystems Announces OpenID Program

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) announced a new initiative around support for OpenID, a decentralized, web-friendly single sign-on mechanism that allows consumers to reuse a single login across different websites. Through this initiative, Sun will explore the changes needed to make OpenID applicable to a broader spectrum of business and technical challenges.


This initiative is designed to aid in solving the proliferation of login challenges and expand OpenID beyond low-risk transactions such as blog comments. As part of this program, Sun will invite participation from customers and technology partners interested in combining and converging OpenID with enterprise-ready technologies like SAML and Liberty Alliance's Identity Web Services Framework.

"We're excited about finding ways to augment the use of OpenID with technologies that meet web users' needs for autonomy and convenience while making it easy to meet stringent security and privacy obligations," said Jim McHugh, vice president of software infrastructure marketing, Sun Microsystems. "Sun has been participating actively in the community dialogue around OpenID and related technologies, and sees great potential for OpenID's use alongside enterprise-ready software infrastructure."

In order to explore the boundaries of OpenID as a trust system, Sun is offering an OpenID Provider service to its 34,000 employees. Using Sun-based OpenID identifiers at an OpenID-accepting website can convey in this simple and secure manner that the user is a Sun employee, a piece of information that can enable access to employee discounts and unlock other special services all across the web. Sun will work with partners to extend special services on this basis.

The Sun OpenID Provider is built using OpenSSO, the open-source project that is providing the basis for the Sun Java System Access Manager and Sun Java Federation Manager products, as well as OpenDS, the open-source project that is providing Sun's next-generation directory services. Both of these projects now include OpenID extensions.

Sun will also determine how to OpenID-enable its own websites in an appropriate manner, as well as how best to add valuable OpenID support to additional products and platforms, such as the Sun Web Developer Pack.

To obtain more information on Sun's OpenID initiative, please visit http://developers.sun.com/identity.

For more information about Sun's Identity Management offerings, please visit http://www.sun.com/identity.

Sun Microsystems Announces OpenSolaris as Industry's Most Comprehensive Multi-Vendor Storage Operating System

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced it is donating storage technologies for storage developers within the OpenSolaris community. This will enable community members to combine OpenSolaris with hardware from any source to create compelling storage solutions at a fraction of the price of traditional proprietary storage vendors. This combination of open source and commodity hardware heralds a new stage in the storage industry.


Sun is taking the lead in creating a community-driven software development platform that speeds time-to-market for storage application development and which better addresses customers' ever-evolving data management and archiving needs. Sun is donating the source code to the Storage community at http://opensolaris.org/os/community/storage/ which will feature email forums, design documents and open source code.



"Just as free and open source code has changed the way server and desktop operating systems are developed, evaluated and deployed, today marks a big step in repeating this model for storage software technology," said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software, Sun Microsystems. "Sun is taking the lead in changing the market by enabling the creation of compelling low-cost storage solutions via the free and open availability of open source software, including Solaris, on commodity hardware from a wide-range of vendors including HP, Dell, IBM, and Sun."



Today Sun also announced the previously Sun-only flexible administration features of Solaris ZFS will be donated to OpenSolaris. ZFS is a dynamic file system which simplifies management and adds functionality. The features donated include:

• ZFS Clone Promotion feature, which allows storage users to turn a clone back into the active file system;


• Recursive Snapshots feature, which automatically creates snapshots for all descendent file systems.


• Double Parity RAIDZ, a data protection enhancement to that provides storage users with enough protection so that no data will
  be lost if up to two devices fail


• Hot Spares for ZFS Storage Pool Devices, data protection disks that can replace failed or faulted devices, eliminating downtime
  after disk failure.

Sun and its partners are also introducing the following storage technologies into the OpenSolaris Storage community:

• Point-in-Time Copy data service and Remote Mirror data service - allows volumes and their snapshots to be replicated between physically different servers. Includes filter-driver framework and utilities. This is the first commercial version of replication software that has been open sourced;


• NFS v4.1 (also known as parallel NFS) -- provides scalable parallel access to files distributed among multiple servers;


• YANFS (formerly known as WebNFS) - Java implementation of the client side of the XDR, RPC, NFSv2, and NFSv3 protocols;


• iSCSI device drivers -- provides both the initiator and target support for the IETF iSCSI protocol which allows the use of the SCSI protocol over TCP/IP networks;


• OSD device drivers and related software -- provides both initiator and target support for storage devices that adhere to the SCSI Object-Based Storage Device (OSD) command protocol;


• QLogic Fibre Channel HBA driver – The QLogic QLC driver enables booting from internal and external Fibre Channel devices and are now a part of OpenSolaris, making Sun’s stack of drivers which facilitate I/O activity to host bus adapters open from top to bottom – a first in the world of open storage;

OpenSolaris already provides an extensive array of storage software including a native CIFS client, UFS, Solaris Volume Manager, Traffic Manager (multipathing I/O support), a complete Fibre Channel framework with drivers, as well as traditional target drivers. Please see http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/storage/ for the entire list. Sun also has plans to open source the following technologies in the coming months: Sun StorageTek QFS shared file system, Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager, Sun StorageTek 5800 client interfaces and simulator/server and other storage-related technologies.



OpenSolaris Launches The First Open Source Storage Development Community
The new Storage community on OpenSolaris.org will help give developers a quicker way to deploy data-intensive applications. The community includes developers adding data management functionality and customizing the storage stack for new applications and platforms; system administrators implementing Solaris technology in data centers; educators and students researching data management in universities; and new users exploring the technology and discovering that OpenSolaris offers new opportunities. Application developers that adopt OpenSolaris as a storage platform can now utilize and enhance their existing data services and have the means to develop their own data services.



Further details on Sun's Storage family can be found at http://www.sun.com/storage.