UltraSPARC IV+ delivers the industry's only "on the fly" upgrade path that has allowed customers like NBC's NBCOlympics.com and Abacus to leverage the binary compatibility of the Solaris 10 OS, enabling a seamless transition to the latest server technology and a guarantee that their applications will just run. The value proposition of the UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based server line is increased with Oracle's new multi-core pricing policy, which helps customers take advantage of the latest advancements in multi-core design.

"Today we announce the second wave of world-record benchmarks on the UltraSPARC IV+ platform that further distances us from all competing server platforms on the market. Our new cycle of UltraSPARC innovation is delivering incredible gains for our customers who are looking for the best performance and value", stated David Yen, executive vice-president, Scalable Systems Group, Sun Microsystems.

NBC and Abacus are two examples of the many new customers that are using the new UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based systems for significant performance gains, ease of upgrades and better overall system value.

NBC's NBCOlympics.com, the official NBC Web site of the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, Italy, will be powered by a combination of Sun Fire v490 UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based systems and Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers. The servers run the Solaris 10 operating system with Sun N1 System Manager to ensure maximum uptime, fault recovery and load management. In the lead-up to and during the Games, Sun Services is providing installation, engineering expertise and support to NBCOlympics.com.

Abacus, a provider of co-operative data, data management and analytical services for direct marketing, purchased three UltraSPARC IV+ Sun Fire V490 servers. Abacus runs its own large Data Warehousing application that builds lists for direct marketing activities, and will leverage Sun services to help manage its entire data centre.

"During our testing phase we ran custom Abacus applications and achieved a two times performance gain. The upgrade to UltraSPARC IV+ processors was a business decision for us that will save us a considerable amount of time and engineering resources while, at the same time, gave us performance increases and cost savings on power, cooling and space", stated Doug Tschudy, Vice President of Systems and Network Services at Abacus.

Sun announced five performance leading results, including three new world-record benchmarks for a wide range of data centre application environments:

• Sun Fire E25K achieved a new world record TPC-H SF3000 benchmark with the Solaris 10 OS running Oracle Database 10g Release 2, yet again outperforming IBM POWER5 server and beating the HP Integrity Superdome Itanium server by 47 percent.
• Sun Fire UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based systems running Oracle 10G R2 exceeded existing results on the Avaloq Banking KTB 2.0.6 benchmark, enabling Avaloq to process 464 transactions per second, far exceeding previous results which topped out under 400.
• Sun Fire E6900 Systems and Sun Fire T2000 with CoolThreads Technology combined together delivered a world record result for the SPECjAppServer2004 Benchmark in the standard category, beating out Intel Itanium and Xeon and IBM POWER5+ architecture-based systems.
• Sun Fire E6900 exceeded previous world records on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark, beating out recent results based on a Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 480 Itanium server and an IBM POWER5 by 6 percent and 40 percent respectively.
• Sun Fire E25K outperformed top benchmark results on the SPEC CPU2000 SPECint_rate2000 benchmark over IBM POWER5 server and HP Integrity Superdome Itanium server by 27 percent and 32 percent respectively.

Starting at $30,995, the flagship UltraSPARC IV+ server family is available immediately and includes the V490, V890, E2900, E4900, E6900, E20K and E25k servers, in addition to the UltraSPARC T1 processor-based Sun Fire T2000 servers announced last December, 2005.