Sun delivers dramatic performance increases with Solaris 2.4 for SPARC systems.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 13, 1994-- Sun Microsystems Computer Co. (SMCC) Tuesday announced it has begun shipping the new Solaris 2.4 software environment for SPARC systems, providing dramatic increases in performance and quality to all classes of Sun users.

Included with all new SPARCstation and SPARCserver systems, Solaris 2.4 increases database performance up to 30 percent, NFS throughput by 26 percent, TCP/IP throughput by 40 percent and desktop performance by 25 percent.

"Our customers have extensively tested Solaris 2.4 on the SPARC platform. They are telling us that they are impressed with the results and that this release has the highest performance and highest quality ever," said Jay Puri, vice president of product marketing for SMCC.

Increased Performance and New Capabilities

Solaris 2.4 software delivers substantial performance increases over previous versions as indicated by internal test results and industry-standard benchmarks. With its multi-threaded foundation, Solaris 2.4 software has boosted its database and NFS performance lead, increasing LADDIS network throughput by 26 percent on a SPARCcenter 2000 server from 2,575 to 3,242 operations per second.

The recent outstanding results of 2,152.60 transactions per minute (tpm) on the SPARCcenter 2000E system were obtained using Solaris 2.4 with the Informix database and were based on the Transaction Processing Performance Council Benchmark C (TPC-C). This translates into a price/performance result of $863 per tpmC.

Solaris 2.4 software also offers significantly higher desktop performance, such as text scrolling, window manipulation and graphic image display speed. Solaris 2.4 software exceeds all previous releases of Solaris 2.x and 1.x by 12 to 25 percent in overall desktop performance.

Users of Solaris 2.4 on SPARC can benefit from new features such as a journalled file system for enhanced availability and transparent overlays for faster graphics performance. Also new to the operating environment is a Motif-based GUI system installation and handicap-user keyboard support.

Co-packaged with Solaris 2.4 at no additional charge, Wabi 2.0 provides high-performance access to the most popular Microsoft Windows applications.

Leading Software Vendors Realize Significant Gains

A variety of leading independent software vendors (ISVs), from commercial database manufacturers to technical application vendors, tested the Solaris 2.4 software and realized quality and performance benefits with their applications. Further, SMCC's internal tests with OLTP benchmarks show excellent scalability up to 20 CPUs with Oracle databases.

"Real world stress testing using an Oracle Financials workload and extensive use of each other's products have allowed us to meet the demanding requirements of our broad base of mission-critical customers," said Joseph Vassallo, vice president of Sun Products Division, Oracle Corp. "Early product integration and performance tuning have created optimized versions of Oracle 7.1 and Solaris 2.4 for same-day shipment."

"Informix has used Solaris 2.4 extensively for its server development, including much of the development work for the latest release of its industry-leading parallel processing relational database, INFORMIX-OnLine Dynamic Server Version 7.1," said Tim Shetler, vice president of product management, Informix Software Inc. "We've seen substantial gains in performance and reliability with this release."

Sybase Inc. is combining its System 10 SQL Server with Sun's Solaris 2.4 to enable Sybase customers to achieve better performance from their database applications that run on SPARC systems. "Solaris 2.4 brings in a new kernel asynchronous I/O (KAIO) feature that allows our customers to run applications across their enterprise at rates up to 30 percent faster than with Solaris 2.3," said Mark Pine, senior vice president, Server and Connectivity Group, Sybase.

With Solaris 2.4, Ithaca Software, an independent division of Autodesk Inc., was able to improve the performance of its HOOPS graphics library. "Solaris 2.4 is fast and stable, definitely the best Solaris release yet," said Azhar Khan, HOOPS Device Interface (HDI) product manager, Ithaca Software.

"We can now provide our customers, consisting of over 100 commercial software developers, an increase of up to 40 percent in the performance of HOOPS on Sun systems." The recent tuning of HOOPS by Ithaca and the power of Solaris 2.4 make this possible. In addition, for the first time, the HOOPS/Solaris combination will provide Ithaca's customers access to hardware accelerated texture mapping.

Currently, there are more than 9,300 32-bit third-party software applications available for Solaris software running on hardware architectures scaling from inexpensive notebooks to multi-million dollar, 63-processor enterprise servers and supercomputers. Because the Solaris 2.4 environment is binary-compatible with previous Solaris 2.x releases, all Solaris 2.x applications will run with the new version.

A+Edition 1.1 for Solaris 2.4 Enterprise Server

Also today, SMCC, and Amdahl Corp., announced that A+Edition 1.1, for Solaris 2.4 Enterprise Server is now being shipped, expanding the A+Edition product line to include support for SPARCserver 1000/1000E and SPARCcenter 2000/2000E systems running Solaris 2.4 software. A+Edition 1.1 is an unbundled system software product that provides large-scale commercial server customers with even greater performance for heavy multiuser workloads.

Multiuser performance is increased significantly when running A+Edition 1.1 with Solaris 2.4 on large server configurations. Internal testing with the industry standard SPEC SDM KEN-BUS benchmark has shown a performance increase of 81 percent on an 8-CPU SPARCcenter 2000 server and 316 percent on a 16-CPU system.

Leading database vendors such as Informix Software Inc. and Oracle Corp. support the A+Edition 1.1 enhancement to Solaris 2.4, because it offers significant benefits to large commercial database users. "Oracle customers with large timesharing or client-server environments can realize enhanced performance with A+Edition 1.1," said Vassallo.

Pricing, Upgrades and Support

Solaris 2.4 licenses are bundled with Sun systems, including the recently introduced SPARCstation 20 Model HS11 computer. Solaris 2.4 upgrades can be purchased separately from SMCC.

A+Edition 1.1 for Solaris Enterprise Server is available immediately from SMCC for SPARCserver 1000/1000E and SPARCcenter 2000/2000E customers. SMCC's pricing for A+Edition 1.1 is $1,500 to $2,500 per CPU and SunService includes A+Edition 1.1 support free with every Solaris support contract.

Sun Microsystems Computer Co. (SMCC), the world's top supplier of open network computing solutions, is a division of Sun Microsystems Inc. Built on Sun's legacy of "The Network is the Computer," SMCC's SPARC/Solaris workstation and server family leads the UNIX market. The company has its headquarters in Mountain View.

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Note to Editors: Sun, the Sun logo, Sun Microsystems, SunSoft, the SunSoft logo, Solaris, NFS, Wabi, and the Network is the Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems Inc. All SPARC trademarks, including the SCD Compliant logo, are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International Inc. SPARCstation, SPARCserver and SPARCcenter are licensed exclusively to Sun Microsystems Inc.

Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based on an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems Inc. A+Edition is a trademark of Amdahl Corp. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Co., Ltd. All other product or service names mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

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Larry Lettieri, 415/336-6117