Demand for Low-Latency, High-Speed Delivery Continues to Drive Technology Enhancements for Financial Institutions

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jul 01, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:JAVA) today announced new benchmark
performance results for Thomson Reuters market data platform. The new
benchmark demonstrates that running the platform, known as Reuters
Market Data System 6.0.3 (RMDS), on Sun technology not only provides
the best throughput performance to date by breaking the
million-messages-per second barrier, but also the lowest available
network latency on a 1Gb Ethernet.

"Intel is focused on engineering architectures which fully
optimize the features of our processors to achieve lowest possible
latency in trading operations. This involves close collaboration with
partners such as Sun around both hardware design and the unique
features of Solaris 10 for the benefit of our joint customers," said
Nigel Woodward, Global Director, Financial Services for Intel. "Sun
has invested in Intel fasterLAB program to facilitate this joint
engineering activity."

Algorithmic trading continues to drive the quest for greater speed
and lower latency in the capital markets sector with firms needing to
re-architect their trading systems for low latency and high
performance. This need is even more critical today as financial
organizations strive to keep pace with new technology and remain
competitive in the face of increasing competition.

"Financial institutions are now building or looking to build
optimum infrastructures to support this step-change in performance and
take advantage of the computing power that is now available, whilst
still reducing power requirements and total cost of ownership," said
Ambreesh Khanna, CTO, Financial Services Group, Sun Microsystems.
"Through partnerships with the world's leading application vendors and
innovators like Intel and Thomson Reuters, Sun enables firms to
achieve low-latency, high-availability trading."

Scalable performance is especially important at higher throughput
rates, since a significant reduction in end-to-end trade latency gives
capital markets firms a critical trade timing advantage in the face of
increasing market data and trading volumes - without necessitating
big-budget infrastructure replacement work. Experience has shown that
only the Solaris(TM) Operating System can continue to deliver
deterministic latency performance at very high message throughput
rates.

Benchmark test highlights:

-- The Benchmark was conducted using Intel-based Sun Fire(TM)
X4150 servers with dual Quad-Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) X5460 3.16
GHz processors, running Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System
(Solaris OS) technologies and utilizing a 1Gb Ethernet network
infrastructure. This benchmark was done using the Thomson
Reuters standard topology, not stacked topology.

-- The highest throughput for a Source Distributor (1,010,000 -
1.01 Million messages per second) and Point-to-Point (P2PS -
876,000 messages per second) achieved to date on a two-socket
server for Reuters Market Data System in a traditional
topology on Solaris/Intel/1GbE.

-- More than 3.0 Million outbound user messages per second for
the Point-to-Point Server fanout.

-- RMDS network end-to-end latency on 1GbE network infrastructure
is the lowest to date on Solaris/Sun/Intel. Sun's Solaris OS
standard networking stack provides the lowest end-to-end RMDS
latency compared to previously published results.

-- End-to-end RMDS 6.0 latency on the Solaris OS platform at the
rate of 480,000 messages per second is sub-millisecond and at
500,000 messages per second is at one millisecond.

-- To date Solaris OS is one of the few platforms able to measure
RMDS latency at 700,000 messages per second, providing under
1.5 millisecond end-to-end latency for RMDS at this message
rate.

For more information on Sun's work in Financial Services:
http://www.sun.com/solutions/landing/industry/financial_services.xml

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global
marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network Is The
Computer" -- Sun drives network participation through shared
innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can
be found in more than 100 countries an on the Web at http://sun.com.

Copyright 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Sun,
Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Sun Fire and Solaris are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in
the United States and other countries.

SOURCE: Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Rebecca Lui, 408-276-5292
Rebecca.lui@sun.com

Copyright Business Wire 2008