Feature Story

Cut Costs Without Cutting Corners

Pump ROI back into the infrastructure through better resource utilization

Making do with less is standard operating procedure for today's businesses. The promise of an upturn, no matter how gradual, is more and more elusive. As the economy continues to stammer, IT professionals are required to become well versed in the art of thrift. Wringing maximum value out of the existing IT infrastructure is a good start to achieve costs savings. Simply using resources more effectively is an easy way to make money back on an existing IT investment. Many businesses have data center utilization rates hovering between 15 to 20 percent. That leaves a gold mine of resources ready for a business to tap into just by improving utilization.

What's preventing businesses from realizing better utilization rates is an outbreak of the 1:1:1 ratio — one application per operating environment per server. While this ratio is effective for meeting peak load targets, it's off the mark for achieving IT efficiency. The more things that need to be managed, the more time-consuming and expensive that infrastructure becomes. Clearly, this approach to managing the infrastructure doesn't scale effectively — a big problem when saving IT dollars is the primary goal.

The old paradigm of managing infrastructure resources is largely to blame for the current system bloat. Traditionally, organizations have invested in people to manage this legacy of 1:1:1. So as the business grew, people-management costs significantly increased — a practice that is prohibitively expensive.

Many IT managers also thought having dedicated server environments was a more reliable way to ensure performance and availability while mitigating security risks. But allowing each department to control its own resources has exacerbated the problem of doing more with more, rather than doing more with less. Finally, to meet workload requirements, IT managers often looked to peak workloads as the barometer for system needs. Yet basing server needs on peak usage levels is costly and inefficient, as normal loads typically require just a fraction of those resources and not all applications will peak at the same time.

An obvious way to combat these costly practices is through server consolidation. But simply getting more applications onto fewer servers is not enough. Effective server consolidation is contingent on maintaining the confidence of IT managers that applications will have the resources they need to meet performance levels. It's also important that applications housed on the same server can be isolated to avoid fault propagation.

Said another way, server consolidation is only valuable if IT managers have the same assurance that performance levels will be on par with levels achieved by the 1:1:1 ratio and the confidence that one application will not adversely impact the security or availability of other applications co-hosted on the same server. There is a way to make this a reality. By implementing the technique of virtualization into your data center utilization strategy, you can achieve all the benefits of the 1:1:1 setup while simultaneously reducing IT expenses.

N1 and Solaris™ Containers: Partners in Utilization

Relying on the principles of virtualization, N1 and Solaris Containers — both solutions from Sun — offer a comprehensive strategy to make the infrastructure work harder and smarter while yielding superior returns on existing IT assets. N1 drives the complexity out of the data center by making it behave as a single, unified system. N1 turns the heterogeneous compute resources of the data center into homogenous pools of resources onto which services and applications can be appropriately mapped. N1 maps services to underlying resources such as servers, storage, and networks, and then allows them to be remapped on the fly to deliver against business goals such as greater performance, scale, availability, or utilization.

Solaris Containers take virtualization to an entirely new level by enabling servers to be flexibly partitioned into multiple independent execution environments within the same instance of the Solaris Operating System. N1 is the context for the management of all data center resources, including traditional discrete servers, together with virtualized resources such as those realized through Solaris Containers. It actively manages those resources to achieve specified business goals.

Solaris Containers make N1 significantly more effective by enabling N1 to assign resources at the appropriate granularity to applications or services as needed. In essence, Solaris Containers enable N1 to more cost-effectively do its job because it can draw on smaller compute resources to feed applications and make every data center resource count.

Squeeze Greater Value out of Every Server

Solaris Containers also change the dynamics of workload management by providing this new level of granularity. Through virtualization, CPUs, memory, or I/O can be broken down into sub-parts and shared between containers. The ability to allocate compute resources on such a fine-grained level greatly improves utilization rates. Through dynamic resource allocation, resources can be also shifted to other containers as needed to accommodate spikes in load. This helps ensure that critical applications will always have available resources to handle peak workloads. In addition, applications can be ranked by importance to the business so resources can be apportioned accordingly.

Dynamic resource allocation via Solaris Containers also promotes greater efficiency: Idle resources can be borrowed from applications that aren't busy and applied to others as needed. And it all happens seamlessly and on the fly. IT managers don't have to bring the system down to reallocate resources to power an application; Solaris Containers share resources automatically. Imagine the improvements in scalability -- both in people and equipment. Solaris Containers reduce the number of servers and operating environments that an IT organization has to manage. Additionally, Solaris Containers take once wasted resources and put them to work powering applications. As a result, IT organizations can simultaneously reduce operational costs while increasing resource utilization.

While resource control is an important factor of server consolidation, so is isolation. Solaris Containers isolate applications using flexible, software-defined boundaries. As a result, applications can be managed independently of each other, even while running in the same instance of the operating environment. This is important because should one application hit a snag or security glitch, the other applications won't fall victim of the domino effect. The virtual boundaries made possible by Solaris Containers also mean that poorly behaved applications will no longer require a dedicated and underutilized system; they can be consolidated with other applications without impacting them.

Let the Savings Begin

Saving money has become a success metric for IT. There's no sense waiting for the economy to recover to get your infrastructure running in high gear. Now is the time to implement cost-cutting initiatives. With Solaris Containers, you can pump ROI back into your current infrastructure by making the most out of your existing servers. Because Solaris Containers let you control server resources at the sub-part level, they put real dollar value back into each server. By decreasing the number of operating environments to manage, operations costs are significantly reduced. Plus, with isolated application environments, there's no need to worry about security glitches or misbehaved applications.

Simply stated, Solaris Containers make more out of what you already have. Not only will you see real business benefits today, you'll also be building the foundation for a revolutionary new way to manage your entire infrastructure via N1.

For further information, please contact innercircle@sun.com.