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"i2 Technologies faces the same challenge as everyone else: to do more with less. Recommitting
to Sun as our development platform helped us achieve that goal. We doubled the speed of
software builds even while consolidating from 13 to 6 systems and shrinking our lease and
operational costs."
--Pallab Chatterjee, President, i2 Technologies, Inc.
Key Challenges
Develop quality software rapidly and cost-effectively
Reduce monthly costs for leasing and managing in-house development systems
Increase developer efficiency
Solution
Recommit to Sun's server platform for development
Consolidate from 13 Sun Enterprise 6500 servers to 6 Sun Fire 6800 servers
Benefits
Increases competitiveness by reducing development costs and increasing software quality
Increases developer productivity by reducing build time by more than 50%
Saves $552K annually by reducing monthly lease costs from $145K to $99K
Reduces costs for administration, power, and cooling with 144 CPUs instead of 364 -a 60% drop
Delivers predictable service levels by enabling more developers to be assigned to fewer systems without contention
Reduces time to reconfigure systems from two days to just hours
Sun Technology
6 Sun Fire 6800 servers, each with 24
CPUs and 48GB RAM
2 Sun StorEdge D240 Media Trays, each
with four 36GB disks
4 Sun PCI Network+SCSI cards
Sun Solaris 9 Operating System
Sun Studio 7 software
Same configuration--6 Sun Fire 6800
servers and all peripherals and
software--is replicated in India
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Success Story
i2 Technologies
Tuesday, April 26, 11:00 AM EST
Consolidation Helps Leading Software Developer Complete
Builds Twice as Fast While Reducing Data Center Costs
A Sun partner for many years, i2 Technologies, of Dallas, Texas, provides software and services
that help customers achieve measurable benefits through improved coordination and collaboration
across the supply chain. Using value chain management methodology, i2 delivers innovative
solutions that increase its customers' efficiency, both within the enterprise and with suppliers,
partners, and customers. The company's software products, which are developed on a Sun server
hardware platform running the Sun Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS), are designed to
optimize revenue and profit, spending, production, fulfillment, and logistics.
i2 Technologies resolved to reduce operating costs by revamping development and consolidating
IT services. Specific goals were to cut monthly costs for leasing and maintaining systems used
for development, and improve developer efficiency by increasing the speed of compiling and
testing new code. The company achieved both of its goals with a Sun Infrastructure Solution for
Enterprise Consolidation.
Sun Enterprise Consolidation Solution
i2 Technologies began using the Sun platform
for software development in 1996. Developers
worked on 13 Sun Enterprise 6500 servers with
28 CPUs and 56GB of RAM, using Sun Studio 7
software for compiling and debugging. The
company's customer support organization
shared the same systems to simulate customer
environments, using the customer's data set.
In 2003, as part of its data center consolidation
initiative, i2 Technologies re-evaluated
its Sun platform. At the conclusion of the
evaluation, the company recommitted to
the Sun server and Sun Solaris Operating
System platform with Sun Studio 7 software.
For i2 Technologies, the Sun Infrastructure
Solution for Enterprise Consolidation consists
of six Sun Fire 6800 servers with 24 CPUs and
48GB of RAM apiece--for a total of 144
processors compared to the previous 364.
"We recommitted to the Sun platform for
development primarily because of its ability
to handle heavy development loads, and
the performance of Sun Studio 7 and thirdparty
software for compiling and debugging,"
says Surku Sinnadurai, CIO of i2 Technologies.
"Sun Studio 7 software is faster and provides
more complete information than comparable
tools from other platform vendors."
Recommitting to the Sun platform also
protected i2's original investment. "With the
Sun Fire 6800 server we are able to run both
the Sun Solaris 8 and 9 Operating Systems,
and the migration from the Sun Enterprise
6500 server was nearly painless and took only
one week," notes Sinnadurai. Upgrading to
the Sun Fire 6800 servers provides future
investment protection, as well, because of the
Sun Fire 6800 servers' superior scalability and
integration capabilities.
Reduced Data Center Costs
By consolidating from 13 Sun Enterprise 6500
servers to 6 Sun Fire 6800 servers, i2 Technologies
reduced the total number of CPUs it leases
and maintains for development by more than
half, without any compromise to performance.
In the process--and with some effective
financing options from Sun Microsystems
Finance--the company cut its monthly
lease cost for its development platform from
$145,000 to $99,000, an annual savings of
$552,000. "Sun Microsystems Finance
was creative and flexible in working with i2
to address the company's finance and
technical needs," says Whitby.
Operational costs dropped, as well,
because the company has 60 percent fewer
servers to maintain, power, and cool. And the
data center footprint shrunk by 200 square
feet, freeing valuable data center space for
other equipment.
Predictable Service Levels
The Sun Infrastructure Solution for Enterprise
Consolidation for i2 not only cuts data center
costs, it helps deliver predictable service levels
for developers--especially for compiling and
testing new code for i2 software. "In software
development environments, a key goal is to give
developers the ability to develop in the shortest
time cycle," says Sinnadurai. "Another is
to give developers and customer support
engineers the flexibility to increase the capacity
of the hardware configuration--number of CPUs,
memory size, and disk storage--to meet the
needs of the task at hand."
i2 Technologies gained these capabilities
through the Dynamic Reconfiguration feature
of Sun Fire 6800 servers, which provides the
ability to logically, rather than physically,
reconfigure Dynamic System Domains while
the Solaris Operating System and applications
continue to run. These Dynamic System
Domains, in turn, enable i2 to assign more
developers to fewer systems without contention.
Increased Manageability
The Dynamic Reconfiguration capabilities
of the Sun Fire 6800 servers also improves
manageability, making it much faster to reconfigure systems with CPUs, memory, and storage.
"When we upgraded to Sun Fire 6800 servers,
we gained the ability to reconfigure Dynamic
System Domains logically, within a few hours,"
notes Sinnadurai.
Dynamic Reconfiguration is particularly
useful when i2 developers need to allocate
capacity during compute-intensive phases of the
development cycle. "Dynamic Reconfiguration
lets us take advantage of unused capacity on
other servers," says Sinnadurai. The company also
takes advantage of Dynamic Reconfiguration to
share capacity with the development environment
in India, which is identically configured
with six Sun Fire 6800 servers and the same
software.
"With Dynamic Reconfiguration of
Dynamic System Domains in Sun Fire 6800
servers, our developers in both the United
States and India can use each others' servers
when their counterparts in the other country
are sleeping," says Sinnadurai. "Unused
capacity in one environment can be put to
use in another rather than remaining idle.
Having the same platform in both Dallas and
India allows us to use a follow-the-sun model
of support and provide 24/7 coverage while
maximizing cross training."
Sinnadurai estimates that Dynamic
Reconfiguration has reduced the management
workload for i2's system administrators by
25 percent. "In the past, system administrators
sometimes had to physically move memory
and CPUs between servers," he says. "Logical
partitioning makes the process much faster,
which frees staff to devote more time to
product support."
More With Less
By consolidating its development platform
to Sun Fire 6800 servers with Dynamic
Reconfiguration, i2 Technologies has found a
way to surmount the challenges facing technology
companies in an increasingly competitive
environment. "i2 Technologies faces the same
challenge as everyone else: to do more with
less," says Pallab Chatterjee, president of
i2Technologies. "Recommitting to Sun as
our development platform helped us achieve
that goal. We doubled the speed of builds even
while consolidating from 13 to 6 systems and
shrinking our lease and operational costs."
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