Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced new industry-leading results with its Sun Fire UltraSPARC IV-based servers running SPECweb99_SSL for secure web-based applications and Linpack for high performance computing. This follows similar records for the Sun Fire midrange platform with key ISVs such as Siebel Systems, further demonstrating the ability to deliver optimized application performance and breakthrough price/performance through Sun's balanced system architecture. Since the launch of UltraSPARC IV-based system, Sun Fire servers have set 14 world records across a range of industry standard and ISV-specific benchmarks.

Sun Fire V490 Servers Set World Record with SPECweb99_SSL
The SPECweb99_SSL is an industry-standard measure of secure web and application serving performance, relevant to all organizations looking to create secure network computing infrastructures such as secure online banking and ecommerce, provision of public health services, or supply chain management. Sun's world record SPECweb99_SSL result was over 18 percent faster than the previous record from HP1 and supported 10,700 conforming connections on a cluster of 4 Sun Fire V490 servers, each powered by 4 UltraSPARC IV 1050MHz processors. This result was achieved using Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 SP2, a "real world" web server on the Solaris Operating System (OS), that demonstrated a secure web solution can sustain a large and scalable number of high throughput secure web server connections.

Sun Fire E6900 Server Delivers on High Performance Computing
The Sun Fire E6900 server utilizing UltraSPARC IV processors demonstrated over 2x performance improvement over the previous generation Sun Fire 6800 servers on the Linpack benchmark1. The doubled performance boost is attributable to Chip- multithreaded processors combined with the new Solaris 10 Operating System optimized for multi-threaded workloads. The Linpack Benchmark is a high performance computing benchmark that measures a computer's floating-point rate of execution. The results reflect the computer systems capability to solve a dense system of linear equations.

Leading Application Providers Deliver World Records on Sun
Previously announced results on Sun Fire midrange servers were achieved with Siebel Systems2 and other key ISVs for their enterprise applications on the UltraSPARC IV processors and Solaris OS. These results demonstrated that Sun builds systems optimized to run in real-world application performance versus benchmarks that are tuned for lab environments. The high availability, reliability, and record-breaking performance of Solaris running on Sun Fire systems makes it an ideal platform for the most demanding organizations running mission-critical enterprise, High Performance Technical Computing (HPTC), and compute-intensive applications.

For more information on Sun Fire systems and world record price/performance on real-world applications, visit http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v490/benchmarks.html and http://www.sun.com/servers/midrange/sunfire_e2900/benchmarks.html