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Curbing Server Sprawl
Sun's New Intel-Powered Servers Save Space and Energy
 Once again, educators dubbed "funding IT" as their main strategic concern in the EDUCAUSE list of Top-Ten IT Issues this year.
As EDUCAUSE noted in its report, "Escalating costs for IT service delivery and maintenance in the face of funding pressures at the institutional level leave little flexibility in many IT budgets.” And as an educational institution's IT needs grow, "server sprawl” — increasing numbers of servers in the datacenter, with spiraling costs for power, administration, and more — grows with it.
Two new systems from Sun can help institutions manage this balancing act. The Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4150 servers, powered by either dual- or quad-core Intel Xeon processors, enable education IT administrators to do more with less equipment. These systems solve critical problems in campus datacenters by offering more performance, higher density, and better power efficiency than competitive systems on the market.
In addition, both Sun Fire X4450 and X4150 servers offer the choice of running virtually any operating system — including the Solaris OS, Linux, Windows, or VMware — helping prevent vendor lock-in and easing integration with existing IT resources.
Early access and beta customers, such as Eastern Michigan University and Technical University of Munich, have already begun to test and implement the Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4150 servers, with positive results.
"The Sun Fire X4450 server running the Solaris 10 Operating System, combined with VMware ESX, has virtually eliminated all performance, capacity, and availability issues in our development and testing environments," says Bill Heilman, platform specialist in the Information and Communications Technology department at Eastern Michigan University.
The Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4150 servers incorporate new, innovative design principles in a shared chassis design for maximum compute density, leading storage capacity, embedded system management, built-in virtualization support, and investment protection. The new chassis design, optimized for cooling and power efficiency, offers industry-leading energy efficiency and performance in a small form factor.
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"The Sun Fire X4450 server running the Solaris 10 Operating System, combined with VMware ESX, has virtually eliminated all performance, capacity, and availability issues in our development and testing environments."
Bill Heilman
Information and Communications Technology
Eastern Michigan University
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Do More with Less
Whether on an academic campus or a corporate one, datacenter space is at a premium. In a recent study of enterprise buyers by Gabriel Consulting Group, 55 percent of respondents said that their server purchases are heavily influenced by power and space concerns, while 65 percent said these considerations will become much more important in the future.
The Sun Fire X4450 server addresses those needs — and prevents server sprawl — with a system design that provides the ideal virtualization platform, with unmatched energy efficiency and minimized footprint in an easily managed package. It's designed to pack more compute power in a smaller space while reducing power, cooling, and maintenance costs.
In fact, the Sun Fire X4450 is the world's smallest four-socket x64 server — and delivers up to twice the expandability and compute power of other servers, yet is half the size. This makes it the perfect choice for virtualization and consolidation, as well as database and business processing applications.
Designed to scale to future computing needs, this x64 server supports up to four dual- or quad-core Intel Xeon processors, 32 memory slots, and eight disks in a 2RU form factor. It can expand up to a 16-way configuration, with up to 128 GB of memory and over 1 TB of internal storage.
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"The fresh Xeon-based servers from Sun mark the company's most muscular play to date in the x86 realm."
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Sun Fire X4150 Offers Room to Grow
Most academic institutions are under increasing pressure to to deliver more services and support more users. They need to generate more computing cycles using fewer servers. The new Sun Fire X4150 is fast and expandable, and its unique design makes it energy efficient, reliable, and easy to manage.
The Sun Fire X4150 is a two-socket rackmount system powered by either the dual- or quad-core Intel Xeon processor in a compact, 1RU footprint. It has up to twice the memory capacity, internal storage, and integrated networking connectivity than other systems in the industry. With up to eight CPU cores, 64 GB of memory, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, three PCI Express slots, and more than 1 TB of internal storage, it’s ideal for Web infrastructure, horizontal database, and storage-intensive applications.
Improving Energy Efficiency for Institutions
As reported in the September issue of EduConnection, energy and utility costs for universities have jumped 27.1 percent over the last two years. Sun is addressing this issue through its Eco Innovation Initiative and eco friendly products.
For instance, the chassis design of Sun's new Intel-based systems is optimized for cooling and power efficiency. That helps the Sun Fire X4450 server consume as much as 50 percent less energy than competitive servers, resulting in lower power and cooling costs.
Lights Out, Costs Down: Simplified Management and Serviceability
The Sun Fire X4450 and X4150 servers are designed for availability and reliability, with hot-swappable and redundant RAID-enabled disks, cooling fans, and power supplies that make component changeover fast and easy. Combined with the embedded Lights Out Manager, the servers are designed to maximize uptime, simplify system management, and reduce administration costs.
Sun offers a suite of services to optimize your Sun Fire X4450 and X4150 server implementations, with combined system and support pricing that’s often less than the cost of purchasing the items separately. Sun can also help you fast-track your consolidation and virtualization initiatives with solutions that help reduce IT costs, improve availability and utilization, and simplify infrastructure management.
Questions or comments? Please email education_news@sun.com
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