sunflash-Distributed to mailing list sun/NC/north-carolina sunflash-Send requests, problems to owner-sunflash@suntri.east.sun.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Florida SunFlash SMI and Amdahl Announce Major Agreements SunFLASH Vol 57 #23 September 1993 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 57.23 SMI and Amdahl Announce Major Agreements covering operating systems software, servers, and customer service targeted at the enterprise computing marketplace from desktop to data center ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contact: Chuck Mulloy (415) 336-6424 Sun Microsystems Inc. Contact: Bill Stewart (408) 746-6076 Amdahl Corporation AMDAHL CORPORATION AND SUN MICROSYSTEMS ANNOUNCE MAJOR AGREEMENTS TO EXPAND MARKET REACH Software, Servers and Service Are Key Elements of Alliance NEW YORK, N.Y. -- September 21, 1993 -- Amdahl Corporation and Sun Microsystems Inc. today announced a comprehensive set of agreements covering operating systems software, servers, and customer service targeted at the enterprise computing marketplace from desktop to data center. The agreements will provide enterprise customers a robust set of open products to meet their requirements in today's changing computer landscape. The alliance leverages each company's key strengths, including Amdahl's 20 years of experience in commercial data center environments and Sun's leadership in networking and open client-server computing. The agreements will provide enhanced solutions to customers who are seeking to leverage their existing investments in information technology while moving to the client-server computing paradigm. Software Agreement Under the terms of the agreement, Amdahl and SunSoft Inc., will jointly develop and produce extensions to the Solaris(R) Enterprise Server product in order to build an environment specially targeted at the needs of the high-end commercial server market. This continues to extend Solaris scalability across the enterprise from laptop to super computer, and allows both companies to significantly broaden their customer base. The development efforts will incorporate technology developed for Amdahl's UTS(R) system, a commercial UNIX(R) operating system for mission-critical mainframe applications, into SunSoft's Solaris software environment to enhance the availability, scalability, reliability, security, and serviceability of large-scale servers, important for the enterprise-wide market. In addition, the two companies will collaborate on multiprocessor performance to address the needs of high-end scalable multiprocessor applications. The two companies will also collaborate on unbundled software products that provide additional value-added, mission-critical features that are essential for commercial applications. These include products in the areas of security, enterprise systems, on line information management, and applications for distributed system management. Initial products developed under this agreement are scheduled to be available in the second quarter of 1994 and will be marketed by both companies. Hardware Agreement The companies also announced an agreement whereby Amdahl will sell Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation's SPARCcenter(TM) 2000 and SPARCserver(TM) 1000 systems. The SPARCcenter 2000 began shipping in May and is capable of 2- to 20-way multiprocessing. It is Sun's most powerful server and is designed to meet the requirements of enterprise customers. The SPARCcenter 2000 provides industry-leading performance in NFS(R) file serving (the LADDIS benchmark), computational performance (the SPECrate benchmark), and multi-user throughput (the AIM III benchmark). The SPARCserver 1000 was announced and began shipping in May. Featuring extremely compact packaging, the SPARCserver 1000 is capable of up to 8-way multiprocessing and is the industry's leader in database price/performance among all other servers, including PC-class systems. An 8-CPU system running ORACLE7 Cooperative server delivered 400.47 transactions per second (tpsA) and price/performance of $5,068 per tpsA, the best in the industry. Both the SPARCcenter 2000 and SPARCserver 1000 feature the XDBus(TM), a dual, high-performance bus design which uses high-bandwidth packet switching to provide excellent connectivity, throughput and data consistency for shared-memory multiprocessing. Amdahl will begin marketing and delivering the SPARCserver product immediately. SPARCcenter 2000 pricing begins at $95,000 with a fully configured system selling for $1.7 million. The SPARCserver 1000 price starts at $36,700. Service Agreement Amdahl and SunService, Sun's newly-created service and support business, also signed a comprehensive hardware and software support agreement. Under terms of this service agreement, Amdahl will continue to manage the customer relationship for systems sold by Amdahl and perform front line problem identification and problem management. In selected data centers where Amdahl currently has resident support personnel, those engineers will provide on-site services. SunService personnel will provide auxiliary on-site and backup support where appropriate. The combination of these two strong service organizations offers customers worldwide a unique and powerful advantage by providing a single point of contact for service. Since the value of these hardware and software products accrues only when they are deployed to achieve positive business results, both companies will continue to explore opportunities to share tools and service technologies. Additionally, Amdahl and Sun intend to offer a wide range of consulting and professional services, to assist customers with enterprise-wide planning, installation, migration, education and management tasks, creating a comprehensive family of integrated business solutions. Synergistic and Long-term Scott McNealy, president and CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc., views the alliance as synergistic, combining Sun's technological expertise in networking and open client-server computing with Amdahl's strength in the commercial data processing environment. "The beneficiaries of this alliance will be our customers," said McNealy. "These agreements combine the value of 8,000 applications written for the Solaris operating environment and combines them with the industrial-strength operating environment which has been Amdahl's bread and butter for years. The additional reliability, availability and security which will be enhanced in Solaris are exactly what our customers have been asking us to provide as they begin to implement client-server technology for their mission-critical needs," McNealy concluded. Joseph Zemke, Amdahl president and CEO, believes the sharing of technologies and strategies will position both companies as major providers of mid-range and large-scale servers for commercial applications. "Amdahl now has an open systems product offering," he said, "that spans from the end user department, with the SPARCserver 1000 and Solaris, to the data center with the 5995M processor and UTS. Together with Sun, we'll be able to serve customers better than either company could alone and bring the economies of high-volume RISC-based systems to the commercial marketplace. We regard this as a long-term, strategic alliance and believe these Sun/Amdahl solutions, with their industry-leading price/performance and scalability, will be very attractive to our established base of large-systems customers," Zemke added. In addition to marketing the new line of products, Amdahl continues to be a major supplier of powerful mainframe computers, data storage subsystems, UNIX system software, applications development and production software, and a wide range of educational and consulting services. With sales last year of more than $2 billion, its products and services are available in more than 25 countries for use in both IBM-compatible and open systems computing environments. Amdahl is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Sun Microsystems, Inc., is an integrated portfolio of businesses that supply distributed computing technologies, products and services. Its innovative open client-server computing solutions include networked workstations and multiprocessing servers, operating system software, silicon designs and other value-added technologies. Founded in 1982, Sun reported fiscal year 1993 sales of $4.3 billion. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California # # # (c) Sun, the Sun logo, Sun Microsystems, SunSoft, the SunSoft logo, SunService, the SunService Logo, Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation, the Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation Logo, Solaris, and NFS are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. SPARCcenter and SPARCserver or licensed exclusively to Sun Microsystems, Inc. All SPARC trademarks, including the SCD compliant Logo, are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. Amdahl and UTS are registered trademarks of Amdahl Corporation. XDBus is a trademark of Xerox Corporation, licensed to Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of Unix System Laboratories, Inc. 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