UGS Corp.

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Peak business activity at the end of each month, quarter and year puts added pressure on business-critical applications and the server systems that run them. The greater demand threatens to erode performance of Oracle, SAP and other ERP, CRM and HR applications at exactly those times when the business needs it most. Accordingly, IT needs to be prepared with enough server horsepower to meet peak demands, even as business needs constantly change and new applications roll out to users.

At UGS, this challenge was complicated by business growth and the numerous acquisitions the company made on its climb to market leadership. New servers kept coming into the company, creating a mixture of hundreds of servers with different operating environments and different levels of reliability and price-performance. As the business grew, this sprawling server environment became increasingly inflexible, sluggish, and costly to operate and maintain.

To counter this acute case of server sprawl, the UGS IT team in 2005 launched an initiative to migrate their Oracle and SAP applications off old hardware and consolidate servers as much as possible. Goals included reduced costs for server administration and maintenance, improved price-performance, and greater flexibility to prepare for peak periods and meet increasing user needs. Additionally, UGS recognized the need for a more cost-effective way to continually scale and adapt its server environment to keep pace with business expansion and accommodate new applications and upgrades from SAP, Oracle and other vendors.

To realize these goals, UGS turned to one of its primary server vendors, Sun Microsystems. The Sun Software Express for Solaris program met an important need for UGS in allowing them to download portions of the Sun Solaris 10 operating environment ahead of its general release and test it with Oracle and SAP applications. Following this evaluation, UGS arrived at a strategy to increase efficiency and flexibility and reduce operating costs: Leverage the Solaris 10 Operating System and consolidate many servers onto eight Sun Fire V440z servers and one x4100 x64 (x86, 64-bit) server.

This new virtualized environment enables UGS to deploy, isolate and move applications rapidly in order to optimally prepare for surges in network usage. Solaris Containers—Sun’s virtualization and software partitioning technology—provide UGS with exceptional flexibility in load balancing that has increased server utilization by 25 percent. The improved flexibility and efficiency, as well as the dramatic reduction in servers used, is expected to bring UGS more than $300,000 in cost savings due to reduced maintenance, operational and administration costs.

While reining in server sprawl and the related costs, UGS has ensured high levels of performance for its Oracle and SAP applications through periods of peak demand and all phases of its business. UGS now provisions servers faster, manages operations like disaster recovery more efficiently, and continues to run Oracle and SAP at peak performance. It’s more proof that Solaris 10 is the industry’s best performing yet affordable operating system for data centers today.