Feature Story

By Chip Brookshaw

July 17, 2007 -- Virtualization has picked up momentum across enterprise IT as a cost-effective way to get more out of computing resources.

Millions of servers are shipped every year and deployed into enterprise data centers by the hundreds or thousands. Each server typically contains a single application running on an operating system. On average, the server utilization is between 5 and 15 percent, meaning that the vast majority of server capacity is not being used. Disk storage arrays are often similarly underutilized, even if the array is on a storage area network. This underutilization results in high costs in terms of hardware, real estate, operations, management, and maintenance, not to mention high consumption of natural resources.

Virtualization technology allows you to consolidate these environments and run them on a much lower number of physical servers. Each environment runs side by side on a single machine and each of them is fully isolated and fully encapsulated to ensure data security. That translates into greater manageability, better use of resources, and tremendous savings.

Sun offers a wide range of virtualization solutions--from software to workstations and servers to storage devices--that will help you overcome power and space constraints and maximize system utilization and cost savings.

It's Only Logical

Sun's approach to server virtualization starts with the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), an advanced OS for virtualization thanks to Solaris Containers.

Solaris Containers can consolidate and virtualize hundreds of applications on a single system, delivering energy savings and a huge reduction in complexity. Solaris Containers also support multiple virtual Solaris 10 OS environments on the same server, bringing high-end partitioning to single and multi-processor servers.

OpenSolaris users can also put Xen, an open source virtualization technology, to work in their data centers.

Sun's approach to storage virtualization starts with an assessment of your current storage environment using a proven methodology called the Information Management Maturity Model or IM3. This methodology helps you understand your current storage utilization and identify and reclaim orphaned storage capacity, and demonstrates what economies you could achieve by implementing a tiered storage environment using the various storage technologies--physical and virtual.