SYSTEMS

Sun to offer most complete and open solution for Solaris and Linux HPC clusters: Sun Microsystems today announced a definitive agreement pursuant to which Sun will acquire the majority of Cluster File Systems, Inc.'s intellectual property and business assets, including the Lustre File System. By acquiring Cluster File Systems, Inc., the leading parallel file system provider, Sun intends to add support for Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) on Lustre and plans to continue enhancing Lustre on Linux and Solaris OS across multi vendor hardware platforms. As previously announced in July 2007, Sun also plans to deliver Lustre servers on top of Sun's industry-leading open source Solaris ZFS solution, which is one of the fastest growing storage virtualization technology in the marketplace. The agreement further extends Sun's momentum in open source and Solaris and complements the Company's current direction to provide the industry's most complete end-to-end High Performance Computing (HPC) storage solution. "This acquisition, coupled with the recent announcement of the Sun Constellation System, the most open petascale capable HPC architecture in the industry, shows our long-term commitment to the open source community and leadership in HPC," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Adding the Lustre technology to our already broad and innovative product line-up will strengthen our portfolio and enable Sun and our partners to offer customers an even more complete and open HPC solution." "Lustre provides a network centric scalability for storage that is well matched with the complete and open Sun Constellation System architecture for petascale levels of performance. This is a clean and extremely scalable approach to provide high bandwidth and low latency access to large amounts of data for HPC applications," says Peter Braam, CEO, Cluster File System, Inc. "Our team is tremendously excited about joining Sun and furthering the mission of extreme scale computing. We have already worked together to deliver several large clusters, for example the fastest supercomputer in Asia at Tokyo Tech and we're now in the process of installing a 500+ TeraFlop and 1.7 PetaByte cluster at Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)." Based on proven, open industry standard technologies, Sun's HPC solutions can quickly scale to allow for rapid deployment and faster time-to-results than competing HPC solutions. Sun's HPC portfolio provides a complete solution for developing, deploying, running and managing the complete range of applications for HPC, from entry level commercial usages to the largest supercomputers in the world. Sun Customers who use Sun's HPC offerings have achieved capital expenditure savings of 30 percent, improved energy consumption by 70 percent, and improved time-to-results by as much as 75 percent. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to be completed in the beginning of Sun's second fiscal quarter, beginning October 1, 2007. The terms of the deal were not disclosed as the transaction is immaterial to Sun's earnings per share.