Virtualization

Sun has numerous customer examples where we have a proven track record of helping customers realize significant benefits and cost savings of consolidating to a Sun environment. Sun has been working in consolidation for years, and have captured our best practices and sharing them in a book called "Consolidation in the datacenter", available to customers on our Web site. Sun has demonstrated some of the unique and key features of our storage and server products that provide customers with an open architecture, that is highly reliable, scalable, secure, and available, and shown examples of how our technologies can help customers reduce the complexity in their environments for cost savings and improved efficiency, performance, and service levels.

Sometimes it's a matter of application consolidation, where servers are not being efficiently utilized. Companies that have been through mergers or acquisitions frequently have underutilized gear simply because their IT operations have not been fully integrated. Other times it can be a matter of physical space where the sheer volume of equipment in a datacenter is too great to justify the cost of real estate. Recently, a customer of ours decided to consolidate because the lease on their equipment was about to expire, which presented an opportunity to re-evaluate their infrastructure and make some changes to optimize their server and storage environment.

Consolidation is the best way to build an IT infrastructure that effectively meets today's business demands and is ready for future growth. Several factors influence how and when a company is willing to change, and these include the desire to reduce complexity, simplify system administration and improve performance and manageability. Some of the more pressing needs we've heard from customers recently are centered around improving business continuity and security capabilities.

This is a common misperception. Even though IT managers might have more funds available today than they did a few years ago, the lessons learned during the down economy about being fiscally accountable will last for a long time. Companies will always strive to reduce IT costs, improve administration and increase utilization of resources. There's never been a better time for a company to consider the benefits of consolidation.

We recommend three rules of thumb for companies concerned about security issues: minimize, standardize and harden. Minimizing server sprawl is an immediate way to reduce complexity and identify weaknesses that could potentially become security risks. Next, standardizing systems makes it significantly easier for IT teams to detect even the slightest change in their environment, including intrusion. Lastly, hardening is an assessment process to remove vulnerabilities particularly at the operating system level. Sun has a number of new technologies built into our own operating system, Solaris, that makes it extremely difficult to fall prey to security threats.

The most important advice I have is to engage support at the CXO level. Many companies approach consolidation as an IT issue, yet the implications— and resulting benefits—are much broader. In fact, the net result is that a company can reduce costs, achieve better utilization and simplify management of IT operations. This is good news for the entire organization.

Consolidation provides an excellent foundation for more effective business continuity planning and rapid disaster recovery, which in turn helps you keep in compliance with new regulations. Our consultants work with you to review both your current infrastructure and future system requirements to develop a contingency plan that provides full assistance with design, implementation and testing of your business continuity and recovery strategy. Plans involve deploying backup and restore, copy and remote replication, and rapid recovery techniques.

Sun consultants review and evaluate your current infrastructure and future system requirements to figure out the solid business benefits of consolidation in your environment. With this type of in-depth justification and TCO analysis, we can work with you to define a new consolidation architecture for your systems, storage and network. Storage and server consolidation go hand in hand, and a complete consolidation solution will address all components of your current architecture and inventory.

Consolidation can help your company achieve economies of scale and cut costs. Systems are more centralized, so administrators are more productive for day-to-day operations, providing an opportunity to re-skill personnel for higher value activities.

Sun consultants help validate your business requirements and develop technical solutions based on the SunTone Architecture Methodology. This methodology is a set of best practices that emphasize the importance of building architectures with service-level requirements such as security, reliability, availability, and scalability. The consolidation solution can enable IT to allocate service levels to specific groups, based on their needs and strategic importance to your business. Insufficient compute capacity can degrade performance and end up in unplanned downtime when your demand is at a peak. On the flip side, sometimes servers are configured with excess CPU, storage and memory to accommodate peak loads, but are running as low as 30% capacity during normal operations. Consolidation can deliver higher service levels at lower cost by optimizing your infrastructure and integrating both applications and data within a unified architecture.

You could be experiencing several things such as complexity issues from managing server sprawl, data explosion and backup nightmares, inability to access your data when you need it, out-of-control IT growth, high cost of underutilized computing resources, staffing resources that are stressed by an increase in service level requirements, without an increase in your budgets. Also, if your company has acquired a new business or gone through a merger, you may be seeing a need to trim expenses or reduce infrastructure redundancies, save floor space, and cut back on your utility costs.

Consolidating multiple operating systems and multiple applications to a larger, single platform reducing the number of software licenses you need, lowering your cost.

Sun consultants help validate your business requirements and brainstorm technical solutions based on the SunTone Architecture Methodology, which emphasizes the importance of building architectures with service-level requirements such as security, reliability, availability, and scalability. We work with you to assess your current security environment, and help you design a security solution customized for your unique business needs. Through consolidation, you can increase overall security by implementing a highly secure operating environment such as Solaris, and move assets into controlled datacenters.

Yes, Sun has a very comprehensive suite of consulting, education and support services that provide extensive consolidation experience to help you simplify administration and manageability, optimize your staff utilization and improve availability, efficiency and profitability. A few examples are services that can help you build interfaces to other systems, consolidate server and storage workloads, and migrate your applications and data, including Application and Mainframe Migration Services, Storage Consolidation and Migration Services, and platform installation and integration.

Consolidating on Sun Fire CoolThreads systems running the Solaris 10 Operating System can help you optimize your Web infrastructure by:

• Reducing your power and space requirements by as much as 95%
• Delivering greater throughput and performance in a much smaller footprint
• Reducing the number of servers by more than 60 percent by securely hosting multiple Web or application servers on each system
• Reducing management costs and risks through greater automation of administration tasks with virtualization technologies

One of the many compelling reasons to select Sun Fire x64 servers for Web Tier consolidation projects is their ability to consolidate heterogeneous, multi-OS application environments on a single server.

Using VMware ESX Server to virtualize system resources, applications running with a mix of Solaris, Linux, and Windows operating systems can be provisioned on the same server. These disparate applications can run unchanged in their own native environments while sharing server resources. This gives IT organizations greater flexibility and higher server utilization when consolidating disparate systems onto fewer highly scalable, reliable servers from the Sun Fire x64 product line. System resources allocated to a Solaris Container are protected so that applications can run without concern about resource contention or security violations in other containers.

For those who want to use industry standards, the Sun Fire x2100 and x4100, x4200 x64 servers feature the industry-leading AMD Opteron processor to preserve your existing application investments. Their enterprise-class features and intelligent chassis designs deliver the highest levels of efficiency, reliability and manageability available in the x86 market today.