COMMERCIAL NEWS

San Francisco, CALIF. — Reinforcing the most widely adopted Internet infrastructure, Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems announced a new initiative to deliver high availability solutions based on the latest software and hardware technologies available from both companies. The new solutions address the high availability requirements of enterprise applications, e-commerce Web sites, and collaborative online exchanges. With these advanced high availability solutions, businesses can protect customer loyalty and revenue opportunities through improved quality of service and massive scalability supporting tens of thousands of simultaneous users.

As a result of the initiative, Oracle and Sun are introducing Oracle Parallel Fail Safe on Sun Enterprise servers (including the recently announced UltraSPARC III processor-based Sun Fire systems) and Sun StorEdge arrays running Sun Cluster software, providing sub-30 second failover time. The Oracle and Sun high availability development efforts evolved out of the Oracle E-Business Continuity and the SunUP programs. Both programs are devoted to creating easily implemented and managed high availability solutions with a minimum of error and maintenance.

Through the high availability initiative, Oracle and Sun are delivering significant increases in data availability while also reducing planned and unplanned downtime due to system failures, human errors and disasters.

Oracle and Sun also plan to deliver additional high availability for disaster recovery protection based on the recently announced Oracle Data Guard. Availability of these jointly developed and tested solutions is scheduled for Spring 2001.

Sun Cluster software leverages the ability of the Solaris Operating Environment to deliver the reliability of the datacenter with the flexibility required by the Internet. Combined they extend the capabilities of the Solaris platform to enhance availability and scalability while increasing the overall service manageability.

“Web services can’t go down,” said Doug Kaewert, vice president, Market Development, Sun Microsystems. “The joint development and optimization of Oracle and Sun products will provide our customers with improved high availability solutions allowing them to raise service levels for mission critical applications.”

Oracle Parallel Fail Safe, an enhanced configuration of Oracle Parallel Server, provides intelligent fault detection, diagnosis and recovery of data. Based on Sun Cluster software, Oracle Parallel Fail Safe will now be able to produce transparent failover and recovery, which is up to ten times faster than previous solutions, thus ensuring users continued access to data and applications. In this type of Oracle and Sun clustered configuration, users are protected from any single point of system failure by Oracle Parallel Fail Safe’s ability to automatically re-connect from the failed node to a remaining live node.

“In today’s economy, our customers cannot experience any amount of downtime, scheduled or unscheduled,” said Michael Rocha, senior vice president, Platform Technologies, Oracle. “Oracle Parallel Fail Safe takes advantage of Sun’s clustering technology to provide the high levels of availability our customers require to compete in today’s e-business economy.”

Also significant to the advance of high availability technology is Oracle Data Guard, a recently introduced data protection feature that insulates customers from potential system outages due to system failures, human errors, media corruption and unforeseen disasters. Oracle Data Guard, built upon Oracle8i’s standby database, was developed and deployed first on Sun Enterprise Servers and Sun StorEdge arrays. Oracle Data Guard includes functionality to easily implement, monitor, manage both “smooth” switch-over to the standby server for maintenance and upkeep, and fast failover to and from a standby server in the case of system failures and unforeseen disasters.

General availability of Oracle Parallel Fail Safe and Oracle Data Guard on Sun Solaris Operating Environment are scheduled for early Spring 2001.

The SunUP program is a comprehensive initiative that enables Sun customers and service providers to raise overall service levels for their business and mission-critical applications. The SunUP program is a complete suite of services, products and infrastructure to deliver increased system availability and predictability for the customer. The SunUP program enables the essential collaboration between Sun, customers and third parties to analyze, develop and implement services, infrastructure, best practices and products that will bring about higher levels of availability.

The Oracle E-Business Continuity program eliminates downtime for e-businesses by building high availability into the Oracle Internet Platform. From storefront to supply-chain, the Oracle Internet Platform ensures continuous operation of every aspect of e-business.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision – “The Network Is The Computer” – has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to dot-com their businesses. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com .

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