Sun Microsystems Advances Enterprise Storage Automation With Next-Generation Tape Drive

Sun Microsystems Announces Availability of StorageTek T10000 Enterprise Tape Drive

SANTA CLARA, Calif. March 14, 2006 Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced the worldwide availability of its Sun StorageTek T10000 enterprise tape drive, the next-generation of StorageTek tape drives and ideal complement to Sun’s premier StorageTek automated tape libraries. With the T10000 tape drive, enterprise customers gain industry-leading performance and data throughput, twice the capacity of earlier StorageTek enterprise drives and advanced data protection and security features -- with the superior reliability that is the hallmark of the StorageTek brand.


"Our information lifecycle management strategy is singularly focused on helping our customers manage exponential data growth while lowering costs and enhancing the efficiency of their overall storage operations" said Nigel Dessau, vice president tape business, Sun Microsystems. "Featuring over one-hundred design patents, the T10000 tape drive builds on the rich legacy and proven reliability of the earlier StorageTek T-Series enterprise tape drives and sets a new standard for advanced data storage and protection in data intensive, heavy duty-cycle environments"

Today’s IT managers are challenged to store and protect burgeoning data repositories while managing around-the-clock IT operations, regulatory compliance requirements and evolving customer service needs. Countering these challenges with the addition of storage hardware and software infrastructure typically translates into significant administrative overhead and adds another layer of management complexity, compounding the burden on an organization’s IT staff.

Sun’s StorageTek T10000 enterprise tape drive was designed with these challenges in mind. Raising the bar for enterprise storage reliability and performance in the datacenter, the T10000 enhances storage efficiency to reduce costs, mitigates the risks associated with data protection and retention, and reduces management complexity to help organizations realize the full value of their business information.

Sun’s StorageTek T10000 enterprise tape drive extends the value and performance delivered via StorageTek’s earlier T-Series drives to provide businesses with fast access to large volumes of information for data-intensive backup, archiving, and disaster recovery applications at a very attractive price per gigabyte. Delivering the industry’s highest data throughput rate (120 megabytes/second) and capacity of up to 500 gigabytes uncompressed - or a terabyte of compressed data on a single cartridge - the T10000 tape drive delivers a 250 percent increase in density and 400 percent increase in throughput speeds over the earlier Sun StorageTek T9940B drive. Future generations of the T10000 tape drive will feature expanded capacity up to one terabyte uncompressed on a single cartridge. The StorageTek T10000 tape drive also features Sun’s new, proprietary SafeGuide media-to-drive guiding system, leveraging a longer tape path and a unique tape leader and take-up reel design to mitigate the risk of data loss and corruption and enhance overall reliability. Combined with Sun’s advanced VolSafe write once read many (WORM) media functionality, the T10000 tape drive offers more safeguards to assure the integrity of customers’ critical information than any competing drive technology today.

Customers, Analysts and ISVs Voice Support for StorageTek T10000 Tape Drive

"Sun’s new StorageTek T10000 tape drives ensure superior data management agility across even the most data-intensive environments" said Matt Kixmoeller, director of product management, Symantec Corporation. "Symantec’s NetBackup supports the T10000 drives and also empowers enterprises to take an innovative step forward toward centralized management and recovery of data"

"Customers in data intensive, high duty cycle environments require a high capacity and high performance tape solution" said Robert Amatruda, research manager at IDC. "Solutions such as Sun’s T10000 tape drive will enable enterprise-class customers to effectively safeguard their critical data"

"After a very promising evaluation over the past few months with pre- production series drives, we look forward to evaluating Sun’s high performance T10000 tape drive as one of the components in CERN’s need to handle and store huge quantities of crucial experimental data beginning in 2007" said Charles Curran, storage consultant, CERN -- the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

For more information on Sun’s StorageTek T10000 enterprise tape drive, visit http://www.storagetek.com/products/product_page2773.html

Pricing and Availability

Sun’s StorageTek T10000 enterprise tape drive with Fibre Channel interface is available to customers worldwide today with a U.S. list price of $37,000. The T10000 with FICON interface will be available in July 2006 with a U.S. list price of $44,000.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
A singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world’s most important markets. Sun’s philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.
Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, StorageTek, SafeGuide, VolSafe and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

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Stacey Infantino

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Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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