Simulated Environments Yield Real Benefits

October 2009 Sun Inner Circle newsletter Why green is green This Issue's Letter from Sun CIO Bob Worrall Share: Inner Circle Subscriber Center Get the content that meets your interests and needs. » Join now Print-friendly page Contact Sun

The ability to use a computer to simulate reality is one of the most important capabilities engineers have created for present day society. Go back a hundred years or so: Thomas Edison had to "tinker" stuff into existence. He tried thousands of filaments for his incandescent bulb — one by one. Today, the ability to use high-powered computers to do mathematical modeling and simulations is absolutely vital to the steady stream of engineering advances we've come to expect.

The ability to simulate is becoming a powerful tool for IT managers as well. The technology now exists to develop, build, configure, test, tune, port, and provision various elements of the IT environment virtually. And in ever-increasing numbers, IT managers are using these capabilities to cut cost and risk. Consider just a few examples.

Storage Simulator: Fast, easy way to optimize storage allocation

Sun recently introduced a Storage Simulator in conjunction with the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System. The Simulator makes it possible to install and manage a virtual storage system on a laptop or desktop and experiment with various allocation schemes to find the best strategy for your requirements.

The Storage Simulator provides a graphical interface that lets you choose which replication profile makes the most sense for the storage that will be managed by your appliance. Each option is ranked by availability, performance, and capacity.

Traditionally, trying to get performance data for storage has been a painful exercise — prohibitively complex or expensive in many cases, resulting in overprovisioning of cache to meet performance requirements. Sun's Unified Storage Systems unleash the power of DTrace, the dynamic tracing framework that's part of the Solaris Operating Environment, to provide storage performance data the same way it traditionally provides server and network performance insights. In other words, the same tools you're using to manage and profile your servers can now be used on your storage.

"This is a really cool way to play with one of these new storage appliances from the comfort of your existing desktop or laptop with no extra hardware required," wrote Sun Distinguished Engineer Josh Simons in a recent blog. "It's all virtual, baby."

You can download the Storage Simulator free of charge.

Virtual Lab environment: Virtually eliminating porting risks

The thought of porting software often strikes fear in the hearts of IT managers. The stakes are high, the risks are great, and the complexity can sometimes be overwhelming. Through its online Virtual Lab, Sun's is removing some of the cost, risk, and potential for delay from the porting process.

Sun's Virtual Lab environment makes it makes it possible to develop, port, and test applications virtually. The Lab features pre-installed SPARC or x86 processor-based Sun servers with Sun Studio Development Tools, Java SE, Sun's Cool Stack, MySQL, Solaris 10, OpenSolaris and more. Qualified Sun partners can access this secure development environment over the Internet.

Using the tools and Sun hardware available at the Lab, partners can also qualify their applications on the Solaris OS. The Virtual Lab helps eliminate many of the traditional stumbling blocks associated with the porting process: there are no system configuration issues, no problems with lab space, no concerns about power requirements.

How many administrators were required to manage these 21,000 virtual desktops? A grand total of two.

The Virtual Lab offers the full spectrum of resources free of charge. Additional services are also available from Sun to further expedite the testing and porting process. For example, Sun can provide assistance with technology adoption for Solaris Zones; email support is also available. For more information visit the Sun Partner Advantage Program area of Sun.com.

Streamlining the use of simulation technology

In the past, one of the key obstacles to taking full advantage of simulation technologies has been the hassle of finding the right systems, with the right amount of memory and disk space, to do the simulation job.

Without the proper tools, IT managers can under- or over-allocate resources, resulting in excessive cost. And users run the risk of having a job fail before completion and wasting weeks of time — or shutting out other users with jobs that could have been processed at the same time.

Users should simply be able to submit jobs, and IT managers shouldn't have to waste money over-provisioning. That is why Sun and MSC Software have worked together for years to give users more powerful, high-performance solutions that can help more work get done faster and at less cost.

The result of this alliance is a combination of software products — Sun Grid Engine, MD Nastran, and SimManager — that helps users identify and allocate the required resources for job completion, freeing up systems for other jobs or users.

MD Nastran, from MSC Software, is a comprehensive multidisciplinary engineering simulation and analysis tool that handles complex, large-scale problems, performing fast and robust system simulations. MSC SimManager is a virtual build-and-test management system that manages all aspects of performing simulation. Sun Grid Engine software is a resource and job management tool that provides policy-based workload management and dynamic provisioning of application workloads.

The combination of MD Nastran, SimManager, and Sun Grid Engine software allows users to allocate compute resources evenly across a compute cluster, assured of having the disk space and memory needed for optimal performance and successful job completion.

Running these software elements on high-performance systems, such as Sun servers with chip multithreading technology and other innovations, can also result in better throughput, higher compute capacity utilization, and reduced energy and operating costs.

Net result: faster, easier access to simulation resources, faster and broader adoption of simulation technology, and expedited cost savings and efficiencies for IT management.