To the Point

Get Predictable Business Availability from Sun

Ensuring business availability involves synchronizing the operating system, servers, data centers, applications, volume management, and other components in a complex infrastructure. Businesses that rank availability as a priority should look at their systems as a symphony. Each instrument that makes up the infrastructure needs to be fine-tuned so it performs harmoniously as an ensemble. Understanding the intricacies of maintaining availability throughout the entire infrastructure is key to delivering predictable availability.

For the last 20 years, Sun has relentlessly delivered massively scalable, highly available systems for the networked business environment. During these two decades, Sun has been at the forefront of innovation fortified by practical experience gathered through successful deployments of availability infrastructures.

Expertise and Practice Makes Perfect

Unlike other vendors who focus primarily on product offerings to improve business availability, Sun addresses the complete customer environment — products, processes, and people. At the technology level, Sun understands what needs to happen at every tier in the stack to ensure business availability. Such deep knowledge of the individual parts, as well as the sum they comprise, is lacking with vendors that offer simple point product clustering software. In addition to understanding the complex play of an availability infrastructure, knowing what can and won't work within a cluster goes lockstep with business availability.

Backed by field-proven experience, Sun has established best practices to analyze, architect, implement, and maintain highly available systems. For example, the SunReady Availability Assessment Service helps customers analyze their availability environment, identify gaps, and architect solutions. Sun also employs a rigorous testing framework for every tier of the stack to identify how a change in one tier dominos to the others, making it easier to pinpoint potential trouble spots and protect the integrity of the service. To reduce human errors and effectively use people resources, Sun's availability solutions have a simple operational model with minimal need for manual interaction.

Sun's leadership in defining new availability models, creating flexible architectures, and implementing best practices in business availability brings tremendous value to our customers.

Comprehensive Solutions Reduce Time to Value

Sun delivers customized end-to-end availability solutions, which help to reduce the complexity, cost, and risk of deploying new technology. The Sun™ Customer Ready Systems (Sun CRS) program integrates Sun and complementary third-party hardware and software products into a ready-to-deploy SunPlex™ environment.

A SunPlex environment — Sun's high availability clustering solution — is an industry-leading service level management platform consisting of the Solaris™ Operating Environment, Sun servers, storage devices and network connectivity products with Sun Cluster 3.0 software tying it all together. A SunPlex environment takes general-purpose clustering beyond the realm of high availability by adding the simplicity of single system manageability and the potential of seamless scalability.

In essence, the cluster becomes a single logical view of the total computing environment from an application service and administration perspective. Essentially, a SunPlex environment can arrive preconfigured and preinstalled in a rack and is ready to go at the customer's site. And because integration takes place at the factory, operational and human errors can be greatly reduced.

Many vendors don't provide such ready-to-deploy availability solutions. Rather, each piece of the availability solution must be put together from the ground up by someone at the customer's location. This tacks on risk to the deployment and increases time to value. With Sun CRS, customers have reported 90 percent to 95 percent drops in deployment times. It's a simpler, safer, and swifter deployment experience.

Proven Expertise

Don't just take our word for it. Sun has helped a number of customers to consolidate their systems on the SunPlex environment, meeting or exceeding their availability expectations. British Telecom (BT) and BellSouth Corp., for example, provide hard-and-fast proof that an integrated systems approach to availability pays off with a bonus. Sun helped BT — the largest telecommunications supplier in the United Kingdom — trim systems downtime and cost. Applying its systems methodology to improving uptime at BT, Sun was able to reduce BT's fail-over time from one hour to five minutes. When BellSouth saw a market opportunity to provide infrastructure support, it enlisted Sun's availability expertise. Today, BellSouth is enjoying great success as an infrastructure provider by delivering mission-critical availability.

Collaborative Innovation

Innovation at Sun does not happen in isolation, but through collaboration with our customers, partners, and other systems providers. To this end, Sun has established the SunUP Network — an innovative user forum dedicated to improving system uptime. Together, Sun and its customers work to improve availability measurements by benchmarking, determining the root cause of downtime incidents, and identifying and implementing best practices to reduce failures.

Today, more than 400 customers are enrolled in the SunUP Network. Over the past three years, the group has been delivering and measuring availability on 5,000 machines, achieving real delivered availability. This unique approach to availability measurement is pushing the envelope on availability targets as well as revealing ways to improve service levels of the high availability systems delivered by Sun Microsystems.

Sun's availability solutions deliver predictability and help ensure confidence with lower total cost of business availability. Get more information on Sun's availability solutions for the enterprise.

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