Sun Microsystems Inc. announced wider international availability and addition of new features to the Sun Grid Compute Utility available from Network.com.

In addition to the United States, the $1/CPU-hr, pay-per-use Network.com utility offering is now available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom. Developers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and end-users from these countries will now have immediate access to Network.com's powerful, on-demand computing infrastructure powered by the Solaris 10 OS, as well as to the open source and ISV applications published in Network.com Application Catalog. Users signing up for a Network.com account will get 200 CPU-hrs free for a limited time.

"International availability is an important milestone for Network.com. A large number of new developers who specialize on building compute intensive applications can now deploy on Network.com," said Aisling MacRunnels, vice president of software marketing at Sun Microsystems. "ISVs publishing applications in Network.com Application Catalog will find their addressable market segments rapidly increasing with the broader international access."

The newly announced features include Network.com Internet Access that enables applications running in Network.com to securely access external data and services over the Internet. This feature allows applications running on Sun Grid Compute Utility to access data irrespective of its location on the Internet. This opens the possibility for Network.com to offer new services that are mashups of data and services from multiple sources thereby enabling the developers to take advantage of the online services and databases in innovative ways.

Customers across a wide range of industries -- from life sciences to education to manufacturing -- have already started leveraging the new features of Network.com in their applications. The Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) project at Brookhaven National Laboratory is using the Network.com to supplement its massive computational needs. "We have recently ported Starsim, the mainstay simulation application for the STAR project, to the Solaris 10 OS to take advantage of the new features of the Network.com computing infrastructure," said Maxim Potekhin, the simulation leader of the STAR project. "We are approaching the next frontiers in our studies of the 'perfect liquid' formed from nuclear matter under extreme conditions, and Network.com is helping us move our simulation effort forward efficiently and without additional infrastructure investment. Looking forward, the STAR project offers a unique opportunity to bridge commercial and non-commercial grids, making a step towards realization of the Sun Microsystem's vision of computing power as a utility."

Sun is also announcing the start of a limited Beta program for developers to try out the new Network.com Job Management Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The APIs provide programmatic access for the most commonly used tasks such as transferring data, applications and results to and from the Sun Grid Compute Utility. The APIs enable integration of Network.com into the enterprise datacenter. They allow for automated offloading of peaks capacity requirements when demand exceeds available capacity in the enterprise datacenter.

"The availability of APIs is an important milestone in delivering developers with the ability to perform production scale tests right from their development systems" said Mark Herring, director of marketing for Network.com. "It provides developers with the necessary mechanisms to build applications that can truly harness the dynamic compute capacity provided by Network.com."

For more information, visit www.network.com. 

About Network.com

Network.com provides access to compute infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis via its Sun Grid Compute Utility at $1/CPU-hr. It is powered by the Solaris 10 OS and Sun Grid Engine running on Sun's x64 hardware. CPU-hr is defined as the aggregate time spent across all CPUs and rounded up to the next hour.

About Sun Microsystems

A singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world's most important markets. Sun's philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at www.sun.com/.

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