Université catholique de Louvain

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The faculty and administration at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) have a reputation for finding innovative solutions to seemingly vexing problems. For example, when controversy arose concerning the university's reliance on French as its instructional language in the Dutch-speaking Flemish town of Leuven (where it was originally located), UCL created an entirely new town—Louvain-la-Neuve—some 20 miles away, to serve as its new home.

So it's no surprise that when it came time to replace six aging Dell servers on the verge of obsolescence, the UCL IT team hoped to find an equally innovative technology solution. And Sun delivered.

A single Sun Fire V20z server powered by dual-core AMD Opteron processors and running the Solaris 10 Operating System replaced four Dell PowerEdge 650 servers and two Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers in the university's data center.

Thanks to the Containers feature of Solaris 10 OS, the applications and data that were once housed on each of the Dell servers now reside on a single server with a single operating system through the creation of six "virtual" servers. The result is an extremely cost-efficient, small form-factor, easy-to-administer system that offers greater flexibility, more compute power, greater security and higher availability than the six-server Dell solution it replaced.

Moreover, the solution was deployed quickly and easily—without requiring assistance from Sun. Instead, UCL System Manager Frédéric Oger, who was already familiar with Solaris, required only three days of training at Sun to enable him to single-handedly deploy the solution, as well as confidently set up the virtual servers and take full advantage of the other innovative features of Solaris 10.

He and his colleagues—the other 120 information specialists charged with supporting the university's IT architecture—have been extremely pleased with the Sun solution. In addition to the cost savings derived from a 6:1 server consolidation, the solution allows for optimal use of server memory, as the OS has only to be loaded once. In addition, memory can be dynamically allocated on the V20z while the server is running, resulting in significantly reduced downtime and increased system availability across the university.

Among other features, the new "watchdog" function of the Solaris 10 Service Management Facility has proven to be particularly beneficial. The feature automatically monitors processes and launches a restart command if a process fails unexpectedly. Another new function manages hardware errors and provides IT administrators with precise information on the location of the error, to enable fast fixes and prevent downtime.

In fact, the IT team is so pleased with the Sun solution that they're already looking forward to upgrading to future versions of Solaris. They're confident that new features provided by Sun can only increase the benefits to the university.