NEWS BRIEFS

Palo Alto, CA — Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that A.B. Watley Group Inc., a leading technological and service-oriented brokerage firm, has selected Sun StorEdge T3 arrays to power its online trading systems. A.B. Watley chose Sun because it needed an infrastructure that would allow its UltimateTrader II direct-access brokerage software to consistently produce online trades in approximately one second.

“Sun is the recognized leader in dot-com technology. Sun has a great reputation, and when you look at its storage roadmap, the high standard of excellence that Sun provides in all of its products is evident. Knowing what our specifics needs were, Sun provided an extremely stable solution with a price/performance ratio that EMC’s monolithic storage just couldn’t compete with,” said Eric LeSatz, vice president of IS administration for A.B. Watley Group Inc.

“With plans to implement a SAN environment, A.B. Watley needed storage that would not only handle its growing client base, but would also have the flexibility to seamlessly transition into this new environment,” said Denise Shiffman, vice president of marketing, Sun Network Storage. “The Sun StorEdge T3 array will allow A.B. Watley to position itself with SAN-ready technology that supports and scales with its existing, growing infrastructure every step of the way.”

In addition to the Sun StorEdge T3 array, A.B. Watley’s infrastructure is also based on highly available and scalable Sun Enterprise 4500 servers, Sun’s Netra 1405 servers, Netra T1-105 servers, Sun Ray Enterprise appliance, Sun StorEdge A3500 arrays, Sun StorEdge L1000 tape library, Sun StorEdge Component Manager software, and Sun’s Solaris Operating Environment software.

A.B. Watley provides its clients with the ability to directly execute real-time stock trades through its online UltimateTrader product. A.B. Watley’s strategy is to leverage SAN technology to maximize the use of its storage resources. Based on demand, A.B. Watley can deploy the Sun StorEdge T3 arrays and other devices, such as tape libraries and solid-state disks, across its IT infrastructure in an intelligent and seamless manner.

“In the nature of our business – providing an online mechanism for stock trading – high availability isn’t just something that our clients would like; it’s a mandatory requirement. Sun StorEdge T3 arrays and Sun Enterprise servers provide maximum availability and can be scaled on demand,” said LeSatz. “More importantly, the Sun StorEdge T3 array will fit very easily into a SAN environment and is an excellent building block for our future storage area network.”

With a system unable to support its quick growth, A.B. Watley replaced the existing Windows NT environment with Sun’s Solaris Operating Environment software.

“The Solaris Operating Environment is able to respond to the ever-expanding online trading market and provide a strong backbone for A.B. Watley to handle the increased amounts of market data and decimalization of the exchanges,” said Andy Ingram, vice president, Solaris Marketing. “Having replaced Windows NT in favor of the highly scalable Solaris Operating Environment illustrates the confidence A.B. Watley vested in Sun Microsystems, specifically the Solaris Operating Environment.”

The Sun StorEdge T3 family of network storage arrays delivers the industry’s most scalable high-availability storage solutions for entry-level workgroup to high-end enterprise environments. The system ranges from 162 gigabytes (GB) to 88 terabytes (TB) and scales capacity, performance and availability in a linear and predictable fashion. As capacity increases, performance increases by a predictable amount, and availability scales as additional data paths and redundancy are added. This provides higher performance as capacity grows.

The Sun StorEdge T3 array has many features that are compatible with any network. The fibre channel interface provides better data throughput than the SCSI interconnects, on which competitive products are based. The onboard cache results in faster I/O service time and, therefore, better performance. The Sun StorEdge T3 array will fit easily into a SAN environment, making it a solid foundation for any storage area network.

A.B. Watley Group Inc. is the parent company of A.B. Watley, Inc., a multifaceted, technological and service-oriented brokerage firm offering two proprietary online trading systems, UltimateTrader and WatleyTrader, that provide real-time data feed and instantaneous execution for the most active segment of the online trading community. The A.B. Watley, Inc. Institutional Sales and Trading Division specializes in the execution of complex and sensitive large-block equity transactions for institutions, major investment managers, insurance companies, banks, and high-net-worth individuals.

Sun Network Storage was formed by Sun Microsystems in July 1998 and is a recognized multi-billion dollar industry leader in the UNIX and open systems storage market. Sun is changing the rules in network storage by delivering software and hardware written to an open network architecture. Sun’s commitment to standards enables timely availability of new technology, investment protection for existing technology, and a thriving partner community. The comprehensive Sun StorEdge family of products enables customers to match storage to the application while providing scalable capacity and performance in a “pay-as-you-grow” architecture.

The Sun Enterprise server family is the industry’s only single, binary-compatible product line featuring a range of servers that scale from one to 64 processors – providing customers with flexibility, investment protection and an unparalleled growth path. Designed for workgroup, departmental and data center computing environments, the Sun Enterprise server family provides an ideal platform for a variety of applications, including enterprise resource planning, electronic commerce, data warehousing, Internet/Intranet and customer management systems. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com .

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