Washington, D.C., Sun Network Computing, 2 May 2006 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced a revolutionary new file system that delivers ground-breaking capabilities by automating common administrative tasks, protecting data from corruption, and providing virtually unlimited scalability. Solaris ZFS 1.0 will be available in June as part of the next commercial release of the Solaris (TM) 10 Operating System (OS), the most advanced operating system on the planet. The latest release of the Solaris 10 OS, Solaris 10 6/06, will also combine advanced Predictive Self-Healing and networking technologies with a fully-supported PostgreSQL open source database, further enhancing Solaris 10's reputation as one of the premiere platforms for hosting high performance, mission critical database solutions.

As the world's most advanced file system, Solaris ZFS automatically detects and corrects silent or accidental data corruption to help provide information integrity. Solaris ZFS is also designed to greatly simplify data management by eliminating the need for a volume manager, one of the most costly and time consuming parts of data management today. For example, typical system administration tasks that today can take more than 40 minutes to complete can now be executed within a matter of seconds with no file system downtime, significantly reducing the administration costs associated with data management. Additionally, Solaris ZFS is the world's first 128-bit file system, which gives the system virtually unlimited data capacity. The advanced scalability and management available in Solaris ZFS make it an ideal replacement for many legacy UNIX(R) File Systems and Veritas deployments.

Solaris is the premiere platform for hosting high performance databases. Oracle recently named the Solaris 10 OS as its preferred open source 64-bit development and deployment environment. Now, Sun has also incorporated the open source PostgreSQL database, which will be included with the next update of the Solaris 10 OS and will be fully supported by Sun. Sun is working with the PostgreSQL community to help them leverage the advanced technologies in the Solaris 10 OS, such as Predictive Self-Healing, Solaris Containers and Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace).

"In the face of increasing compliance requirements, with capacity continuing to double every 9-12 months, today's file systems have their roots in technology from the 70's. Solaris ZFS was designed from the ground up to deal with today's data management challenges and have a lifespan of 20-30 years. This 128-bit file system is capable of storing 16 billion times more self-healing data than today's file systems while radically simplifying volume management. It's one of this year's most important innovations. ", said Tom Goguen, Vice-President, System Software, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Solaris 10, the most advanced operating system on the planet, is available on more than 650 SPARC and x64/x86 platforms supported by more than 2,200 independent software vendor (ISV) applications. This unmatched level of functionality and hardware support, combined with the industry's only application compatibility guarantee has already accelerated adoption of the Solaris 10 OS to more than 4.5 million registered licenses.

Revolutionary New File System Technology Solaris ZFS 1.0 has unique features unmatched by any other commercially available file system technology. Customers can benefit from the cutting-edge data integrity technologies, ease of use and management, incredible performance and virtually unlimited scalability only found in Solaris ZFS.

• End-to-End Data Integrity - Because of the ground breaking combination of checksum and transactional copy-on-write mechanisms, Solaris ZFS can provide the confidence CIOs and system managers require for the correctness of their data. Solaris ZFS has advanced error detection that can identify damaged data and can correct it on-the-fly. For example, if one side of a mirror is damaged by an accidental overwrite, ZFS can detect, repair and recover with no interruption in service.
• Simplified Administration - Solaris ZFS provides a pool-based architecture model that allows all the data to be shared, functioning as virtual memory management. Solaris ZFS file systems can grow and shrink automatically without the need for a volume manager to allocate extra storage space.

Solaris ZFS also provides the ability to take instantaneous snapshots of a file system at any point in time, significantly reducing the amount of time and resources administrators typically spend recovering files manually.

• Significant Performance Gains - Solaris ZFS is architected for speed. The copy-on-write design allows random writes to be turned into faster sequential writes. Dynamic, pool-wide striping lets input/output (I/O) bandwidth increase automatically when adding storage. Multiple block sizes automatically optimize to whatever workload is presented. Intelligent pre-fetch senses read patterns and accelerates accordingly. And a sophisticated, extensible I/O subsystem design employs scoreboarded pipelining and dependency scheduling to deliver huge performance gains.
• Immense Data Capacity - With virtually unrestricted capacity, Solaris ZFS is the world's first 128-bit file system.

The Solaris 10 OS is part of the Solaris (TM) Enterprise System which also contains the Sun Java (TM) Enterprise System (Java ES), Sun N1 (TM) System Manager software and Sun Studio Software Developer tools available at no cost for both development and deployment. All of this software makes the Solaris Enterprise System the only comprehensive and open infrastructure software platform available today.

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.