Media: Steve Conway, 612/683-7133 Financial: Brad Allen, 612/683-7395 CRAY RESEARCH SUPERSERVER PRODUCTS MOVE TO SOLARIS 2.4 OPERATING ENVIRONMENT WITH MAJOR DATA CENTER ENHANCEMENTS "Domain" and RAS Features Add Sophisticated Partitioning Capabilities and Allow Multiple Operating Systems on a Single SMP Superserver BEAVERTON, Ore., March 14, 1995 -- Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE: CYR) announced today that its SPARC-based CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 (CS6400) systems are now shipping with the Solaris 2.4 operating system update featuring major Sun Microsystems and Cray Research data center enhancements. With Solaris 2.4, the CS6400 system creates separate "domains," allowing processors to be dedicated to different tasks and enabling the use of more than one operating system on a single CS6400 superserver. These new Cray enhancements to Solaris 2.4 also increase reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features on the CS6400 while maintaining complete binary compatibility with the Sun product line. The latest version of Sun's popular operating environment has been optimized for scalable, high performance on the CS6400 products and is available on new orders and as an upgrade for existing CS6400 customers, Cray officials said. Creating domains -- or separate systems-within-the-system -- on the CS6400 using Solaris 2.4 increases system availability by enabling the administrator to test, debug and verify new or upgraded applications software before installing them on the main system. Physical isolation of the processor domains from the system bus prevents errors in one domain from affecting other domains. That means that production users are not affected by problems imposed during testing and debugging phases of a system upgrade. There is no added system overhead imposed by these domains. "Our superserver systems are designed to meet demanding enterprise computing requirements -- often with thousands of clients accessing high-end servers from workstations, PCs and other desktop systems to run complex applications and to store and manage mission-critical data," said Bobbi Hazard, vice president and general manager of Cray Research's Business Systems Division. "Our vision has been to offer the efficiency, software maturity and ease of use of SMP systems with enhanced scalability and high availability features. The CS6400 superserver products are already the world's fastest, most expandable SPARC/Solaris-compliant systems. With the unique RAS, system partitioning and performance capabilities of our enhanced version of Solaris 2.4, the CS6400 provides the most usable, highest performance open system on the market today," said Hazard. In addition to the Domains feature, Cray Research RAS enhancements to Solaris 2.4 are immediately available and include: - Support for 16 gigabytes (GB) of memory -- enables faster processing and supports more users and larger applications. - Support for the Cray Virtual Console, permitting system administration from any location on the network, including remote power control of the I/O cabinet. - Improvements to systems management programs that monitor system components and provide sophisticated preventative and diagnostic information. These improve the CS6400's ability to sense a wider variety of potential problems and enact a graceful shutdown of the system in response to serious environmental or hardware conditions. Sun's Solaris 2.4 enhancements for the enterprise database market include storage management improvements, such as robust disk mirroring, enhanced data integrity, near- instantaneous file system recovery and a new unattended, automatic heterogeneous network backup facility. The improved database performance provided by Solaris 2.4 will benefit the increasing number of companies moving from proprietary solutions to open systems client/server platforms such as the CS6400 systems, she said. The CS6400 series with the Solaris 2.4 update has been certified to the SPARC Compliance Definition, guaranteeing compatibility with the more than 10,000 off-the-shelf applications that operate on SPARC. CS6400 products are symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems available with up to 64 processors, 16 gigabytes of memory, more than two terabytes of online storage and up to 64 I/O channels. The systems are available from Cray Research Superservers, part of Cray's Business Systems Division. Data warehouse, decision support, transaction processing and multimedia applications are the primary targets for this line of scalable SMP platforms. CS6400 systems are also used as powerful platforms for highly scalar scientific-technical applications. The CS6400 system began shipping in February 1994. One of the largest Oracle sites in Europe, Churchill Insurance, recently ordered two CS6400 systems through Amdahl Corporation serving as prime contractor. The CS6400 system has also been selected by Citibank, United Kingdom insurer Churchill Insurance, SICAN, Electricite de France -- the world's largest public utility -- and other customers to manage Very Large Database (VLDB) applications. Cray Research provides the leading high-performance computing tools and services to help solve customers' most challenging problems. ###