SUN FIRE Servers Outshine IBM’S In JAVA Technology Performane by up to 35%

Palo Alto, CA
April 4, 2001

Sun Microsytems, Inc. today announced that its recently introduced Sun Fire[tm] servers have captured the lead in Java technology performance. These new SPECjbb2000 server-side performance results are world records in Java technology performance and beat the previous results for this benchmark posted by IBM for this benchmark by up to 35 percent.

Unlike IBM, Sun’s systems provide a single, highly scalable architecture across the entire product family. The Sun Fire Midframe servers are a new class of system that brings mainframe features to affordable UNIX(R) midrange computing. No other vendor is delivering design innovations such as redundant component interconnection technology, the ability to dynamically split one system into multiple domains, duplicate hardware components and “on-the-fly” processor upgrades into price points starting below $75,000.

These performance results indicate that the Solaris[tm] 8 Operating Environment (OE), UltraSPARC® III processor and Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) [tm] 1.3.1 release are one of the premier platforms to deploy server-based applications for Internet and enterprise environments. They highlight the unmatched Java technology performance delivered by Sun Fire servers, and the Java HotSpot[tm] virtual machine implementations.

Sun Microsystems’ Sun Fire 6800 server, which uses 24 award-winning UltraSPARC III processors running Sun’s Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 1.3.1. sets the world record of 109,146 operations per second for server-side Java technology performance using the industry-standard SPECjbb2000 benchmark. The Sun Fire 6800 was benchmarked against IBM’s AS/400e Server Series. This system was also re-configured to run 8-way and 12-way SPECjbb2000 tests. In these, it achieved 43,353 and 62,463 JBB operations per second, respectively. The results demonstrate near-linear performance scalability and efficiency with the new product family.

Since J2SE is the basic building block for Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) [tm] on which many application servers, such as the iPlanet[tm] Application Server, are constructed these results further highlight the advantages of the Sun platform and demonstrate Sun’s focus on the real world benefits of increasing delivered application service levels while reducing service level cost and risk.

Established by the System Performance Evaluation Cooperative, the Java Business Benchmark, SPECjbb2000, represents an order-processing environment running typical Java business applications similar to those used in large commercial systems. Enterprises use the benchmark to evaluate performance of servers used at the application layer, as well as the performance of different vendors’ JVM[tm] platforms.

The SPECjbb2000 benchmark demonstrates the compute power and efficiency the new Sun Fire deliver based on the UltraSPARC III platform and the Solaris 8 OE, in combination with the improved performance and efficiency of Sun’s J2SE 1.3.1 release. In addition, the results from the benchmark demonstrate the cost-effective and efficient use of memory that Sun delivers. The four new Sun Fire Midframe servers contain up to 24 CPUs and 192GB of memory.

The SPECjbb2000 benchmark is an objective benchmark developed to represent real world performance of the Java platform on servers. It measures the performance of CPUs, caches, memory hierarchy and the scalability of Symmetric MultiProcessor (SMP) systems. It also measures the implementation of Java Virtual Machine (JVM) including code generation, garbage collection, thread synchronization and some aspects of the operating system. According to SPEC, combining a JVM with a high SPECjbb2000 throughput with a database tuned for online transaction processing will provide businesses with a fast and robust multi-tier environment.

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