NEW YORK, NY -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today introduced the Sun Fire[tm] 15K server, its new flagship high-end system built on technologies that radically alter the performance level and reliability, scalability and availability of high-end servers while significantly helping to reduce total cost of ownership. The Sun Fire 15K server is built on what the company refers to as the industry's “most scalable general purpose architecture” and is reportedly better suited than any competitive system for almost any application, from scientific and engineering to business. With 106 processors, two to four times the memory of competitive products with 576 Gigabytes, and 18 I/O hubs for networking and storage connectivity, it is the world's largest single cabinet UNIX® server system. At nearly 2.5 times the MIPS rating (millions of instructions per second) of the largest mainframe, the Sun Fire 15K server has the most balanced high-performance server architecture available and delivers the industry's best benchmark results in real-world applications, including SAP, Java[tm] platform performance (SPECjbb) and high performance computing (Fluent). "The Sun Fire 15K system is the culmination of an 18 month roll-out of our entire compatible product family," said John Shoemaker, Executive Vice President, Computer Systems, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Together with Sun StorEdge[tm] array, Solaris[tm] 8, our new service offerings, and our Sun[tm] Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) suite of software, the Sun Fire 15K offers customers a clear choice to improve their productivity while reducing cost of ownership and regaining control of their data centers." At the heart of the system, with roughly 5 miles of wiring, is the Sun Fireplane[tm] interconnect that offers unprecedented throughput, critical for superior application performance. With the ability to transfer 172 Gigabytes per second, this high performance, "triple cross-bar" design enables predictable, high performance across a wide range of applications. The Sun Fireplane interconnect is the only one of its kind and is 3 to 5 years ahead of expected competitive offerings. Sun Fire 15K can have up to 106 third-generation 64-bit UltraSPARC[tm] III processors with the ability to scale beyond 1000 CPUs. The 900 MHz UltraSPARC III copper processor harnessed by the power of Solaris 8, enables best of breed linear scalability and application speed. The UltraSPARC processor roadmap supports field upgradeability to speeds of 1.8 Ghz and beyond. And with hot CPU upgrades, the Sun Fire 15K server enables resources to be added easily while the system is up and running. The Sun Fire 15K server also features 576 GB memory, unprecedented in a single system, allowing applications to run directly in lightening fast memory without having to access external storage devices. The large single system memory also enables new capabilities for applications never before possible - from large memory resident databases to complex scientific applications like human genomics or offshore oil exploration. "As one of the country's leading research and supercomputing facilities, the SDSC works on some of the world's most challenging biological, environmental and computing issues," said Mike Vildibill, Deputy Director of Resources for the San Diego Supercomputer Center, one of the first customers to use the Sun Fire 15K server. "The Sun Fire offers the performance needed to support our data-intensive requirements ranging from storage management, relational databases, data mining, and data-intensive scientific applications such as those in bioinformatics. The solid reliability and manageability of the system allows us to deploy our most critical services. The combination of reliability and performance makes the Sun Fire a critical component to our IT infrastructure." The new Sun Fire 15K system includes features designed to radically reduce the cost of ownership of large systems through server consolidation and mainframe application rehosting, while helping customers retain their investments in people, training, tools and applications. Since introducing the Sun Enterprise[tm] 10000 server four years ago, Sun has consistently provided features not found in competitive server technology. The new Sun Fire 15K server continues that trend and goes further with features like: Concurrent Dynamic reconfiguration for simultaneous online maintenance, Full hardware redundancy eliminates unplanned downtime, Automatic failover for critical housekeeping and monitoring functions. Already available on the Sun Enterprise 10000, now with an installed base of 5000, Dynamic System Domains make Sun systems the only UNIX servers able to dynamically manage multiple workloads, a key success factor for large scale server consolidation projects. With 5th Generation Dynamic System Domains, the Sun Fire 15K server includes secure domain architecture, each of the 18 Dynamic System Domains, is 100 percent fault-isolated, and enables the movement of CPUs and memory independent from and across other domains. Although other vendors are just now introducing partitions on their UNIX systems, no one else offers the ability to manage and dynamically isolate potential faults like the Sun Fire 15K system. Sun Fire 15K server shares common components with the midframe Sun Fire product line introduced earlier this year. This includes the "Uniboard" technology, which provides common CPU/memory boards, to enable common sparing in order to meet peak demand of resources. This inter-generational compatibility provides guaranteed investment protection and significantly simplifies customers' data center provisioning approach. Solaris Operating Environment -- Providing the Scalable, Available Environment Breakthrough features provided by the Solaris Operating Environment make the new Sun Fire 15K one of the most scalable, available, manageable and secure mainframe-class commercial computers in the world. The proven robustness of the Solaris Operating Environment foundation results in one of the most reliable platforms available today. Additionally, powerful capabilities such as the SunPlex[tm] clustering capability, Live Upgrade, Hot Patching, Dynamic Reconfiguration, Remote Monitoring, Resource Management, Bandwidth Allocations and Automatic System Recovery minimize planned and unplanned downtime to achieve the high availability needed for mission critical application services. Solaris 8 Operating Environment also enjoys the benefits of the best ISV enthusiasm in the industry, ensuring their modern, mission-critical networked applications run well on Sun. Sun today also announced new services to help customers architect, implement and manage their environments with the highest possible availability levels at the lowest total cost of ownership. These include new consolidation and migration services, high availability service packages and the unique RAS Profile service which includes 1300 knowledge-based rules to optimize configurations. All these services are designed to bring together the most efficient combination of people, processes and products to meet customer's specific business objectives. Sun calls into question any further investments in mainframes with the acquisition of mainframe rehosting software from Critical Path, Inc., which migrate mainframe applications to a flexible open computing environment. Although announcements are expected from other vendors, based on the capacity, feature set and RAS robustness, Sun expects its Sun Fire 6800 server announced earlier this year to exceed the capabilities of these anticipated competitive UNIX platform announcements. Sun also demonstrated the first-ever fully integrated product platform ideal for rehosting mainframe applications. The SunTone[tm] Cluster Platform integrates two Sun Fire 15K servers with the recently announced Sun StorEdge[tm] 9960 system and Sun Cluster 3.0 software. This solution takes the power of the Sun Fire 15K to the next level by integrating the best-of-breed storage environment of the Sun StorEdge 9960 system to deliver the industry's premier integrated SunTone Cluster Platform that can deliver an unprecedented 99.999% availability. The Sun Fire Cluster Platform will significantly reduce TCO by delivering a simpler, safer, and swifter choice for a highly available infrastructure. For more information visit www.sun.com