Sun Microsystems Delivers Industry’s Fastest, Densest and Most Reliable Carrier Grade Blade Server

Sun’s Netra ATCA Blade Server Delivers Superior Choice, Innovation and Value; Supports Industry’s First UltraSPARC and AMD Opteron Processor-based ATCA Blades with Choice of Solaris 10 or MontaVista Linux CGE Operating Systems.

LAS VEGAS, NEV. CTIA Wireless Conference, April 5, 2006 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today introduced its new carrier-grade Netra AdvancedTCA (ATCA) blade server family, which includes the world’s first UltraSPARC and AMD Opteron processor-based ATCA blades. Sun Netra ATCA blade server establishes a new standard for ATCA blade servers in the industry, offering up to 30% percent better compute density and up to 10% percent more performance as compared to Intel-based ATCA blade products and is designed for six-9’s reliability, just seconds of downtime a year.

Sun’s ATCA blade server family offers greater flexibility for network equipment providers (NEPs) and service providers worldwide, delivering higher service availability, faster time to market, reduced development costs and lower total cost of operations. In addition, Sun Netra ATCA blade server gives customers more choice by allowing them to mix-and-match processors and carrier-grade operating systems in the same server and is compatible with other Sun servers, StorEdge storage, Java Enterprise System middleware and thousands of Solaris Operating System applications.

"Today Sun strengthens its leadership in the telecom market – Sun’s largest vertical market - where Netra servers are used by all of the top 10 network equipment providers worldwide" said David Yen, executive vice president of the Scalable Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Sun’s new Netra ATCA blade server family adds innovation to open standards-based products, enabling NEP and service provider customers to successfully and profitably deploy next generation, high bandwidth telecom network infrastructure, IP-based service architectures and new revenue-generating services"

Based on open PICMG 3.x and Service Availability Forum (SAF) standards, the new Netra ATCA blade server family includes: the Netra CT900 blade server, a highly-reliable, 12U/14 slot ATCA blade server; the Netra CP3010 blade, the first dual UltraSPARC IIIi processor-based ATCA blade; the Netra CP3020 blade, the industry’s first Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based ATCA blade; the SAF-compliant Netra High Availability Suite (NHAS) and Netra Blade Management Suite; and a redundant Gigabit Ethernet Switch Blade. In addition, Sun’s Netra ATCA blade server will offer a choice of carrier grade operating systems - Solaris 10 and MontaVista Linux(R) Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) – supported in the same ATCA blade server.

"NTT COMWARE CORPORATION is interested in Sun’s Netra CT900 ATCA Blade Server because it is an integrated, open standards-based computing platform, offering a choice of ATCA compute blades and operating systems in the same server", said Senior Vice President, NTT COMWARE CORPORATION. "With a choice of UltraSPARC or AMD Opteron processor-based ATCA compute blades with Solaris or MontaVista Linux Operating Systems in the same server, the Sun Netra CT900 ATCA Blade Server could be used for many types of next-generation telecom applications. Sun’s UltraSPARC T1 CMT technology also provides us the innovation in performance, space and power consumption for our network-facing applications"

Sun Offers Industry’s First AMD Opteron Processor-Based ATCA Blade with Support for Both Solaris 10 and MontaVista Linux CGE Operating Systems

Sun will bring the advantages of the proven, carrier grade Solaris 10 and MontaVista Linux CGE operating systems with a common SAF-compliant management and availability software suite to those customers who choose to use the AMD Opteron processor in Sun’s Netra ATCA blade server. This combination will provide high performance carrier grade reliability with a lower total cost of development and operations for next-generation, high-bandwidth telecom network infrastructure, IP-based service architectures and new revenue-generating services, such as Push-to-Talk, Presence and IPTV.

"The telecom industry is undergoing significant change with consolidation and increasing consumer requirements" said Marty Seyer, senior vice president, Commercial and Performance Computing, AMD. "The strength of the Sun and AMD relationship is carrying over from enterprise computing to carrier-grade servers. The new Netra family of carrier-grade servers is yet another result of our firm commitment to providing innovative, industry standard platforms that help solve key computing issues faced by business today. The telecom industry and general enterprise alike can benefit from the high-performance, low-power consumption and reliability of the AMD and Sun blade server platform"

For customers who require carrier grade Linux OS on Sun’s Netra ATCA blade server, Sun is announcing support for the MontaVista Linux CGE OS. Monta Vista has completed an optimized port of its CGE Linux environment for Sun’s Netra ATCA blade server and Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based Sun Netra blade systems.

"Network Equipment Providers are looking to MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition as their Linux platform of choice for next generation infrastructures" said Mark Milazzo, vice president of worldwide sales, MontaVista Software. "We are very excited about Sun’s decision to offer MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition for its ATCA blade platform. Sun is recognized as a leader in carrier grade server platforms and we look forward to working closely with Sun to offer our MontaVista CGE tuned and optimized for Sun’s new ATCA blade server"

Top Telecom ISV/IHV Partners Provide Backbone of Sun’s Netra ATCA Server Ecosystem

Today Sun announced more than 20 independent software and hardware vendors (ISVs/IHVs) have pledged support for Sun’s new Netra ATCA blade server, including: Ulticom, Interphase, Adax, NMS Communications, Oracle Times Ten, Solid Information Technology, Jnetx, OpenCloud, Flextronics, Veraz and Wind River. In addition, Sun is working with the Java development community to help deliver an open IP-based service delivery platform and facilitate the creation of next-generation, Java-based telecom services.

"Network convergence is driving the need for more flexible service platforms. Sun has combined the modular approach, manageability and openness of the ATCA standard with the proven dependability and performance of Solaris. Sun’s new Netra ATCA blade server provides a natural infrastructure for Network Equipment Providers using Ulticom Signalware to cost effectively build services with the expandability and extensibility needed to respond to the dynamics of network convergence" said Osman Duman, Senior Vice President and CMO, Ulticom.

Executive Vice President of global industry analyst firm, Ovum, Brett Azuma stated that he believes that today’s NEPs need network infrastructure that helps them more rapidly adapt to meet customers’ changing needs. High availability and open standards are base requirements to enable NEPs to compete in the IMS market space.

Availability

The Netra CT900 ATCA blade server and Netra CP3010 UltraSPARC ATCA blade are already shipping and the first units have been delivered to NEP and carrier customers worldwide. The Netra CP3020 AMD Opteron processor-based ATCA blade and Netra High Availability Suite (NHAS) 3.0 are scheduled to ship in second quarter of 2006. Sun reiterated its plans, first announced at the 3GSM Conference in February 2006, to deliver an ATCA-based blade running its breakthrough 8-core, 32-thread UltraSPARC T1 processors by end of 2006, setting a new standard for throughput and performance in an ATCA blade. For more information on the Sun Netra ATCA blade servers, please visit: http://www.sun.com/netra or http://www.sun.com/atca
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, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Java, Solaris, Netra, 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 United States and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. AMD, AMD Opteron, the AMD arrow logo, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices.

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