Virtualized Tenancy

No Need to Re-architect

A crucial technical consideration to SaaS is how to take a single tenant architecture on-demand. After all, many people in the industry might argue that an application has to be architected as multi-tenant before it can be deployed as true software-as-a-service. For instance, if an ISV deploys a single-tenant architecture with hardware dedicated to each customer, then low server utilization could make infrastructure costs very unfavorable. On the other hand, it could take many months to re-architect the application before a market for an On Demand offering is actually validated.

To resolve this dilemma, consider taking a virtualized-tenancy approach. Basically, by utilizing the virtualization capability of Solaris Containers, each of your customers has a dedicated instance of your application running in its own set of containers. Your application thinks it has a dedicated operating environment and underlying infrastructure, when in reality the servers and storage are all shared amongst all of the your customers in a completely isolated manner.

Solaris Containers

Consolidate multiple instances of your applications onto a single system by deploying a virtualization technology unique to the Solaris 10 OS. Solaris Containers, part of a comprehensive offering of Sun virtualization technologies also including Logical Domains (LDoms), uses virtualization to allow you to maintain the one-application-per-server deployment model, while sharing hardware resources. And, Solaris Containers are integrated with other ground breaking Solaris 10 features at no additional cost. With Solaris Containers you can:

• Dynamically move or replicate applications to fit the changes of the business
• Lower costs by deploying on a technology that utilizes only the resources required by each customer
• Lower administrative costs by safely combining multiple applications and/or multiple instances of the same application on a single system
• Increase the security and availability of applications running on the same system by isolating them from one another
• Minimize unplanned downtime with integrated support for Solaris Predictive Self Healing to gracefully isolate and repair faults
• Enhance security by preventing unauthorized access and unintended intrusions

Increase Utilization

The result is that server utilization can be maintained and managed at levels consistent with your business model and performance metrics without requiring a re-architecture of your application to multi-tenancy. In addition, unlike other virtualization technologies, Solaris Containers add less than 1 to 3 percent compute overhead required to support virtualization,. Finally, since Solaris Containers are a built-in feature of the Solaris 10 OS, there are no additional licensing costs.

Increase Reliability

There are additional advantages to be gained by taking the virtualized tenancy approach. Reliability is increased because there is no single point of potential failure as there is in a shared application and shared database architecture. In addition, data security is increased because each of your customer's data runs in their own dedicated database.

Support OnPremise and On Demand With Same Code Base

From a business perspective, you can experience an additional benefit because your OnPremise and On Demand products utilize the same code base. Your message to potential customers is simple and elegant make the decision of application first, then choose the deployment option second. As well, you can provide more choice to your customers by giving them the option to move back and forth from OnPremise to On Demand business models as their needs potentially change over time. This can become a valuable differentiation when compared to competing applications that only offer On Demand or only offer OnPremise deployment models.