Cray/Financial: Bill Gacki, 612/683-7372 Sun/Media: Chuck Mulloy, 415/336-6424 NEW CRAY RESEARCH SUPERSERVERS COMBINE STRONG PRICE-PERFORMANCE, RAS FEATURES, LARGE NUMBER OF APPLICATIONS FOR COMMERCIAL AND TECHNICAL DATA CENTERS With up To 64 Processors, CS6400 Products Are World's Fastest SPARC/Solaris Systems SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 25, 1993 -- Cray Research Superservers (CRS), the Ore.-based subsidiary of Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE:CYR), today announced a new Superserver product line. Martin Buchanan, general manager of CRS, said the new CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 (CS6400) systems, with up to 64 processors, are the world's fastest and most expandable SPARC/Solaris-compliant systems. "Our's are the first high-end servers to combine the strong price-performance of Sun products with the reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features data center managers expect," Buchanan said. "The CS6400 products are enterprise servers aimed at the rightsizing' market, especially commercial and technical data centers concerned about the high cost of upgrading and running mainframe systems," he said. The products were developed by CRS under a Jan. 1992 technology agreement between Cray Research and Sun Microsystems, Inc., Mountain View, Calif., and are a binary-compatible upward extension of Sun's product line. "The SPARC architecture is a powerful foundation for cost- effective scalability," said Scott McNealy, Sun chairman and chief executive officer. "The Sun and CRS product lines will form a price-performance continuum from SPARCclassics to SPARCcenter servers to the new CS6400 products. Sun users who require more power on the network can move to the binary- compatible CS6400 systems with no migration problems." The CS6400 systems run the current version of Sun's Solaris operating environment, which is an implementation of UNIX System V Release 4, he said. "Any program that runs on a Sun system will run on the new CRS systems without modification, and vice versa." "With the CS6400, CRS will address commercial markets with non-traditional Cray applications," said Lester Davis, Cray Research chief operating officer. "That's why CRS is organized as a separate business unit with its own hardware and software development capabilities. Martin Buchanan has assembled a strong marketing and sales team with many years of experience selling into commercial markets, as well as into the technical computing arena. We're confident that the enterprise server market is ready to move to Cray Research added value, especially when this is available on the same price-performance curve as Sun products." Buchanan said CS6400 systems are expandable and can scale with customers' data processing needs. The systems are offered with four to 64 SuperSPARC RISC microprocessors (initially at 60 MHz), 256 megabytes (million bytes) to 16 gigabytes (billion bytes) of central memory, 1.3 gigabytes per second peak memory bandwidth, and more than two terabytes (trillion bytes) of online disk storage. U.S. pricing begins at under $400,000 for the four-processor version, and at $2.5 million for the top-of-the-line 64-processor system. He said CRS expects to sell hundreds of the new systems. Initial shipments of the new systems will begin in late 1993, Buchanan said. Volume shipments are scheduled to begin in first-quarter 1994. CRS is working with customers and prospects in the traditional Sun and Cray Research markets, as well as new markets. CRS is in negotiations with several organizations in the electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), transportation/distribution, manufacturing, university and electric utility markets and will announce these customers when order agreements are signed, Buchanan said. Separately today, CRS announced that SICAN, a leading German microelectronics firm, has ordered a CS6400 system. SICAN is scheduled to receive a 48-processor system by mid-1994. According to Buchanan, the large number of applications available on SPARC/Solaris systems was an important attraction for CRS. "We are leveraging SPARC's leadership in the RISC market through binary compatibility with Sun's product line. As we work with independent software vendors to have their products supported, technical ports are not an issue." Buchanan cited a 1992 International Data Corporation study showing SPARC with a 57 percent marketshare for the UNIX RISC market. Buchanan said CRS is in discussions with several major developers of key software packages and connectivity products, including relational database management systems (RDBMS), transaction processing monitors, fourth generation languages, computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools, report generation packages, hierarchical storage management (HSM) solutions and mainframe connectivity tools. He said CRS recently benchmarked Oracle, the most popular database server, on an early version CS6400 system. "On the benchmark, which simulated 500 users accessing, updating and querying data, the CS6400 performed comparable to a mid-range mainframe system, which would cost more than $5 million, five times that of the 16-processor CS6400 system benchmarked," said Darshan Karki, president of SuperSolutions Corp., Minneapolis, a firm that re-engineers enterprise-wide applications and system software and assisted CRS with the recent Oracle benchmark. Initial target markets for the new systems are: ECAD, financial service and investment banking, general engineering, government, petroleum, and telecommunications. According to A.J. Berkeley, CRS senior director of sales and marketing, CRS will market and sell the new products through its own dedicated international sales force, the Cray Research sales force, a global network of systems integrators and value- added resellers (VARs), and joint initiatives with Sun. "Sun has been extremely helpful in pointing us toward some of the right parties and we've supplemented this with our own contacts. We expect to announce key agreements later this year," he said According to Buchanan, "Our relationship with Sun goes beyond merely licensing their technology. We are working closely with several Sun business units on interoperability and general hardware and software engineering for future systems." He said the CS6400 systems bring together Sun hardware and software technology with Cray Research value-added features for high performance and system reliability and serviceability. "The CS6400 delivers features to the open systems environment that the data center users have enjoyed for years," Buchanan said. "The new system has built-in reliability, availability and serviceability features -- a first in the high-end, open systems server arena." For example, should a component fail, the system automatically reboots, isolates the fault, and reconfigures itself. Uptime is further maximized with "hot swap" capabilities, which allow a failed module to be removed and replaced in the system while it's still running, Buchanan said. Upgrades can also be done while the system is online. An independent service processor performs online and remote diagnostics, logging, and monitoring functions and data is protected through features such as disk mirroring, page isolation, and memory scrubbing, he said. "There are many exciting aspects about CRS and its Superserver," said Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group, a market research firm based in South Yarmouth, Mass. "Most important is the availability of Cray's high-end technology while following a pricing strategy similar to Sun's. The key data center management products...will give the kind of performance and quality that mission-critical applications require. The CRS Superserver will have some of the features that data center managers take for granted that are not in today's UNIX servers. These are essential features and people will look very favorably on them at the kind of price and performance CRS offers." Buchanan said Cray Research was the first high-performance computing company to embrace the UNIX standard. "Over the past decade, Cray Research has substantially enhanced UNICOS, the company's 64-bit symmetric multiprocessing implementation of the UNIX operating system. Many key features of Cray's supercomputing environment -- such as sophisticated tape management, networked batch processing, systems management software, program debugging tools and high-performance compilers -- will also be important for commercial and technical users of the CS6400 systems and will be available in 1994." CRS also announced today that: o CRS has signed a memorandum of understanding with Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation for SunIntegration Services to become a reseller of the CS6400 system; o Electricite' de France, the world's largest electrical utility, Clamart, France, will be an early customer for CRS' new CS6400 system; o CRS has signed a memorandum of understanding with Oracle to make Oracle7 available on the new CS6400 systems; o CRS has signed a memorandum of understanding with the ASK Group, developers of the ASK INGRES Intelligent Database system, to make the INGRES database product available on the CS6400 system; o INFORMIX-OnLine will be available on the CS6400 systems; o Sybase, Inc.'s support for Cray Research's high-end SPARC/Solaris-compatible strategy; o CRS has signed an agreement with Brixton Systems, Inc., Cambridge, Mass., to make available on the CS6400 system Brixton's suite of connectivity software, which links IBM mainframes with open systems computers, enabling data to be shared between these systems; o CRS and Information Management Company (IMC) have signed an agreement for IMC to make Open TransPort for MVS and TUXEDO transaction processing system available on the CS6400 system; o CRS and T-Mass GmbH have signed an agreement for T- Mass to support and distributed UniTree on the CS6400 systems; and o CRS has signed an agreement with JYACC, Inc. to provide its JAM Version 6 Application Development Toolset on the CS6400. CRS is dedicated to creating the world's leading SPARC/Solaris-compliant computer systems. Cray Research creates the most powerful, highest-quality computational tools for solving the world's most challenging scientific and industrial problems. ###