SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- December 2, 2004 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today was named the Best Server Solution in the 2004 Waters Editorial Awards for its innovative use of technology in the financial services sector. As a testament to Sun's "Take Wall Street by Storm" campaign, this prestigious recognition honored the company's continued dedication to offering best-in-class solutions for the industry's leading businesses.
"The editors of Waters are pleased to present the award to Sun for its complete portfolio of new products that Wall Street appears to have embraced over the past twelve months," said Phil Albinus, editor of Waters. "Sun's adoption of Linux has peaked the interest of financial leaders to warrant this esteemed title of 'Best Server Solution.'"
"It is an honor for Sun to receive this coveted industry award from Waters, a publication that defines the challenges that the top global financial services confront," said Stuart Wells, senior vice president of financial services worldwide, Sun Microsystems. "Sun's new family of AMD Opteron-based servers, running either Solaris x86 or Linux, and its entire line of Sun Fire servers, continues to give our customers a leg up on the competition. This award underscores Sun's leadership in one of the world's most demanding markets."
The Waters Editorial Awards acknowledge bold business maneuvers, innovative uses of technology and achievements that supercede the industry standard, over the past year. Editors of Waters and its sister publications, Dealing with Technology, Inside Market Data and Hedge Fund & Investment Technology selected the top technologies, services and people behind the most impressive projects on Wall Street and the global financial community. Waters has been relied on by financial technology professionals worldwide for the past 11 years for focused, in-depth coverage of financial market data and technology.
Demanding Customers Demand Sun
In 2004, Sun launched new servers powered by UltraSPARC(R) and AMD Opteron processors that deliver industry-leading throughput and price/performance, including:
The Sun Fire V490 and Sun Fire V890 servers, based on UltraSPARC IV Chip Multithreading (CMT) technology, double the throughput of Sun's existing four- and eight-way systems at the same price point, and outperform equivalent systems from HP and IBM.
The Sun Fire V40z 4-way server with the Solaris OS, which also runs Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux or Windows operating systems with Microsoft Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) certifications.
The Opteron-based Sun Fire servers posted several world-record industry benchmarks in both performance and price/performance for the most demanding 32 and 64-bit workloads. For example:
1. The combination of Sun Fire V20z and Sun Fire V40z servers running Sun's Solaris OS continues to hold the world-record SPECjAppServer2002 MultipleNode benchmark result. At U.S. $82/TOPS@MultipleNode, this result continues to hold the price/performance record as well as demonstrates the ability to build the complete infrastructure solution based on industry-leading technologies(1).
2. The Sun Fire V40z server continues to hold the world record result on SPEC OMPM2001, a key benchmark that is used to compare the performance of shared memory servers on scientific applications.(2)
3. The Sun Fire V20z, continues to be the fastest 2-way server at safeguarding internet applications and web server transactions according to the SPECweb99_SSL benchmark(3).
