Core Services Corporation

Application Service Provider Doubles Capacity While Reducing Footprint and Costs with Sun M-Series Server Solution

Founded in 1990 and headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey, Core Services is a leading provider of consulting and outsourcing services for Oracle applications. Core has worked exclusively with Oracle technology for 15 years, hosting and deploying Oracle solutions for more than 65 major corporations around the world. Core is a $20 million company with approximately 90 employees. The company operates three data centers in New Jersey and Maryland and has support centers in the United States, China, and India.

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Customer Challenges

Increase CPU power and speed
Reduce footprint
Improve availability of applications
Reduce power and cooling costs

Solution

To meet the growing processing requirements of its larger clients, Core Services upgraded existing database servers to Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 and M4000 servers, along with the Sun Fire T2000 server as application servers. It is also moving its Linux-based systems from Dell to Sun Fire X4100 and X4200 M2 servers.

Business Results

Reduced runtime of manufacturing batch jobs by up to 67%
Increased CPU idle time by 60% at load average
Met client SLA of 10% CPU idle time 97% of the time
Reduced number of CPUs needed by more than 35%
Reduced footprint by two-thirds with compact, multicore servers
Saved $200,000–$300,000 in licensing costs

Products and Services

Story Details

As an example, one manufacturing client’s nightly batch-processing jobs were taking twelve hours to complete, finishing around 8 a.m.. If there were any errors or if the job had to be restarted, users were delayed in being able to use the system until the job was complete. Such a risk would have been increased and would have had a critical impact on the company’s business, as it was planning to open two new plants within six to nine months, along with an additional 200–300 users.

" By going with the Sun M-Series servers, we are able to meet our SLAs with faster, better, and smaller servers. We were able to increase our capacity and actually reduce our footprint and costs. "

— Bimal Doshi, Vice President of Operations, Core Services

To increase processing power, Core Services could have deployed more large servers — essentially scaling horizontally — but that would have added more complexity and cost to its datacenter operations. “Rather than adding bigger servers with the same CPU speeds, we were looking for better, faster servers,” says Doshi.

The Sun Solutions Center for Oracle worked with Core Services to evaluate the needs of its larger clients and recommended Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series servers. Designed for consolidation and virtualization, the M-Series servers bring mainframe class utilization and efficiency levels to the open systems market. These systems, which support hardware partitions and Solaris Containers, deliver 24/7 mission-critical services while reducing power, cooling, and space requirements.

Doshi says a Linux-based Dell solution was not feasible. The fact that Linux does not run on servers with more than four CPUs is a critical limitation. “We had servers with 32 CPUs that had performance issues, so we did not see going back to Linux as an option,” says Doshi.

“Another option was to go with Oracle RAC [Real Application Clusters] licenses and put several four-CPU boxes in silos to ramp up the number of the CPUs,” says Doshi. However, running Oracle RAC is tricky because it requires running Oracle databases on several servers at the same time. “Oracle RAC technology can be challenging, and it requires specialized Oracle database administrators to manage,” adds Doshi.

In the case of this particular manufacturing client, Core Services replaced existing servers with the Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 server running Solaris 10. “The manufacturing batch jobs runs in less than half the previous time, so the M5000 server essentially doubled our capacity,” says Doshi. The goal for this client was to attain 10 percent CPU idle time 97 percent of the time. “Now the load averages about 10 percent, and the average CPU idle time is about 40 percent,” adds Doshi. With the M5000 servers, Core Services can easily meet the SLAs for this client with smaller — and fewer — servers. “We went from 40 CPUs to about 15,” says Doshi. Moreover, “smaller” translated into an incredible two-thirds reduction in the physical space required for the previous servers.

To meet the future needs of other clients, Core Services also purchased two Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers. The company uses Solaris Containers in an innovative way to run Solaris 8 applications that are not yet supported by Solaris 10. In addition, it is using Sun Fire T2000 servers (both four-core and eight-core) as application servers running the Oracle E-Business Suite application tree code and is gradually replacing Dell servers with Sun Fire X4100 M2 and X4200 M2 servers. “We have always been happy with the uptime of Sun servers … moving our Linux systems to Sun servers has been a great experience,” says Doshi.