Blastwave

World's Largest Provider of Standardized Solaris Software Packages Saves Time and Money With Solaris Containers

Blastwave provides the world's largest library of open source, pre-packaged, and standardized software for the Solaris 8, 9, and 10 Operating Systems. The 1,800 available software packages are created and maintained by a worldwide team of “community software maintainers.” The site's 46,000 global customer base — 25 percent of which employ more than 1,000 people — include organizations in industries such as higher education, tier-1 telecommunications, consulting, financial services, and international government agencies. Blastwave is located in Cobourg, Canada, where it hosts the primary copies of the software packages as well as the entire software build infrastructure. Its additional 40 global public mirrored sites ensure timely downloads from anywhere in the world.

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Customer Challenges

Continue to provide packages for the Solaris 8 Operating System
Upgrade servers running the Solaris 8 OS to the Solaris 10 OS
Replace end-of-life hardware and minimize costs
Set and enforce service levels by capping memory and CPU consumption
Improve server allocation and utilization
Add server capacity on demand - quickly and easily

Solution

Blastwave used Solaris 8 Containers to run mission-critical Solaris 8 applications on the Solaris 10 Operating System. Images taken of any Solaris 8 server can be saved and restored - within minutes - as often as needed on servers running the Solaris 10 OS.

Business Results

Flawlessly upgraded servers running Solaris 8 to Solaris 10
Reduced disk space occupied by Solaris 8 applications
Boosted performance of Solaris 8 applications
Projected a 65 percent reduction in rack space with Solaris 8 Containers, saving tens of thousands of dollars in power, cooling, datacenter, and hardware-maintenance costs
Reduced server setup from hours to minutes by using Solaris Containers, enabling more dynamic creation of server environments without adding to hardware costs
Improved resource allocation and increased server utilization

Products and Services

Story Details

In 2008, Blastwave.org wanted to upgrade all of its systems from Solaris 8 to Solaris 10. Several of the servers running Solaris 8 were becoming costly to maintain. Because Solaris 8 systems were used less and less, Solaris 8 servers often sat idle for weeks, needlessly consuming energy and producing excessive heat. Also, given the end-of-service life of the Solaris 8 systems, Blastwave needed to replace them fairly quickly. Finally, Blastwave wanted to take advantage of the Resource Management and Solaris Containers features that were introduced in the Solaris 10 Operating System.

Despite the challenges Blastwave faced surrounding Solaris 8, the organization still needed to support it for customers, especially those that still compiled code on Solaris 8. On April 15, 2008, Blastwave learned about the release of Solaris 8 Containers. Solaris 8 Containers enable customers to create a virtual Solaris 8 system on servers running Solaris 10. Within two days, Blastwave had created several Solaris 8 Containers. "I virtualized critical Solaris 8 production servers and nobody noticed," exclaimed Dennis Clarke, creator and founder of Blastwave.org. "I literally shut the server down, backed it up, created a Solaris 8 Container, restored the environment, and brought the server back up. The process was simple, transparent, and completely flawless."

" Show me your reasons for why you want to keep running your old servers that are the size of a pickup truck in terms of carbon footprint. Why are you still running them? Turn them off and virtualize. A Solaris 8 environment runs in a Solaris 8 Container just like it did before - only it's a lot faster, and it offers all of the additional benefits found only in Solaris 10. "

— Dennis Clarke, Creator and Founder, Blastwave

Not only does it take a minute to create a Solaris 8 Container, but also customers can take advantage of Solaris 10 features including DTrace and ZFS to support the Solaris 8 Container. "I can take a Solaris 8 machine and drop it inside a Solaris 8 Container," says Clarke. "The Solaris 8 environment still runs with everything it once had, but now it has all of the benefits of the new technology that is in Solaris 10. The Container can use only the resources you give it. I can allocate and set limits on RAM and CPU. Also, when I restored a full image of a Solaris 8 server in a ZFS pool on Solaris 10, the server that used to take 32GB of space was down to 20GB of space - and had lost nothing. All of the necessary libraries and files were there. This is because ZFS has the ability to do on-the-fly compression, so servers take less space and are faster."

The ability to create virtual environments in Containers will revolutionize how Blastwave operates. "In the past, when people requested a new Solaris 8 environment I had to physically build a whole new machine for them," says Clarke. "That could take several hours and even days. Today, I can create a new Solaris environment in a Container on Solaris 10 in minutes with just a few clicks, and I don't need to keep the environment running. That's the nice thing about Containers. You can quickly and easily shut them down when you no longer need them and save on resource usage - and simply bring them up again when you need to."

In addition, Blastwave can create Containers on any of its x86 equipment, which will help boost server utilization throughout the data center. "Fortunately, you can run Solaris 10 on just about anything," explains Clarke. "I have IBM, HP, Sun and even some AMD Opteron hardware that doesn't have a label on it, and it's been running Solaris 10 flawlessly with 100 percent uptime for the past ten to twelve months."

Blastwave has already shut down some of its Solaris 8 servers as a result of Solaris 8 Containers and will soon virtualize all of its Solaris 8 systems on Solaris 10. "The end result of this amazing resource allocation is that one may continually pour more and more old legacy servers into the modern Solaris 10 server," says Clarke. "This means that a dual-processor, eight-core Niagara machine like the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 can have sixteen cores running simultaneously. And, I can make an entire rack of older SPARC machines vanish into that one machine. That will save tens of thousands of dollars in power, cooling, datacenter, and hardware-maintenance costs." Commenting on the ability to consolidate a rack of servers onto one system Clarke concludes, "There is no reason to waste energy like that - especially in this millennium when we have access to better technologies and better resource controls. The last excuse for not migrating to Solaris 10 has just been taken away. Just pick up your Solaris 8 environments and drop them in a Solaris 8 Container. No one will know the difference."