The Logical Choice for Enterprise Archival Storage
The need to develop data archiving capabilities is a challenge that every enterprise faces these days for any or all of several needs: whether to accommodate explosive data growth; to respond to the pressure to meet promised service levels and backup windows for users; to provide archive data retention and retrieval requirements; and to better manage rising energy costs. Dean Halbeisen’s Sun BluePrints Online paper “Sun Systems for Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup Software” details the openly architected, intelligent and massively scalable general purpose archive solutions Sun is developing to assist enterprise users in meeting these challenges.
Configuring Highly Available Paths from Sun LDoms Guest Domains to Storage
The Sun BluePrints article “LDoms I/O Best Practices - Storage Availability with Logical Domains” by Peter A. Wilson discusses the approaches and trade-offs for configuring highly available paths from Sun Logical Domains (LDoms) guest domains to storage. Topics include I/O availability, multipath I/O with Solaris OS MPxIO, multipath I/O with virtual I/O failover, virtual I/O failover and network file storage, and multipath I/O to network file storage with virtual I/O failover.
Sun Virtualization Technologies Streamline Management for City of San Antonio
The City of San Antonio (CoSA) allows its residents to pay a traffic ticket, apply for a job, or find information about the dozens of activities online. As its server infrastructure had sprawled to keep pace with its service delivery, CoSA decided to upgrade its IT infrastructure to reduce space, maintenance costs, and enhance service. The solution: Sun’s SPARC servers as a platform for Solaris 10 and Solaris Zones, which provided the best roadmap for return on investment (ROI) with its virtualization technologies and energy-efficient, mainframe-class servers.
Covers CPU, Memory, Virtual Network -Disks-Console, and More
Logical Domains (LDoms) provide built-in and no-cost virtualization capabilities for Sun Chip Multithreading (CMT) Servers, and many are considering implementing it as part of a virtualization strategy. But what about security? Sun’s Jim Laurent recently had to address this question with a federal government customer and decided to share his findings.
A Sun-sponsored IT director’s guide asserts consolidating systems onto the latest server technology and utilizing virtualization techniques will give enterprises increased efficiency, performance and flexibility while lowering costs. In twelve pages, this guide entitled “Reducing Costs by Improving Server Performance” offers what it states is proof that consolidation works. and focuses on Sun servers with CoolThreads technology and Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series servers as solutions that can bring these claims to reality.
Scalability and Reliability Lead French Radio Broadcaster to Sun Technologies
Needing to completely rebuild its Windows-based Web portal and ASP.NET-based applications to support a larger audience with new services, radio broadcaster RTL France began shopping around for a cost-effective, energy-efficient, and easy to manage IT environment that would be reliable and scalable. Open source solutions were its preference. RTL France decided to build a new portal infrastructure using Sun CoolThreads and x64 servers, running Solaris 10. For its applications, Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server proved fast and scalable.
Using Symantec NetBackup, Sun CoolThreads Servers and Solaris
In the Sun BluePrints Online document “Sun’s Reference Architecture for Next-Generation Data Backup,” Dean Halbeisen in Sun’s Enterprise Storage takes readers through a reference architecture consisting of Symantec NetBackup software, Sun CoolThreads servers and the Solaris Operating System. A key objective was to achieve a competitive price/performance metric for the NetBackup solution. Another goal was to determine performance and sizing characteristics of the proposed architecture.
Additional Co-processor Cards, Special Licensing, Network Appliances Are Unnecessary
The Sun BluePrints Online paper “Accelerating IBM HTTP Server Cryptographic Operations Using Sun Servers with CoolThreads Technology” provides an overview of how to offload cryptographic operations onto Sun servers with CoolThreads technology to accelerate IBM HTTP Server (IHS) performance. For Sun servers with UltraSPARC T1, T2 or T2 Plus processors, on-chip cryptographic acceleration eliminates the need for additional co-processor cards, special licensing, network appliances or power hungry add-on components.
Generational Performance Gains in Sun Processors Deliver Impessive Growth
The Sun BluePrints article “Tuning Symantec Brightmail Antispam on Sun Servers with Coolthreads Technology” provides background information on SBAS software and CoolThreads technology-powered servers, the configurations used for performance measurements, the challenges presented by benchmarking anti-spam software, and the actual steps used to tune the hardware/software combination to achieve the reported performance levels.
Sun’s Server Hardware Virtualization & Partitioning Technology for CoolThreads Servers
Logical Domains (LDoms) provides built-in virtualization capabilities for Sun’s CoolThreads Servers. Recently released Version 2.1 provides support for:
CPU power management
jumbo frames
configuring domain dependencies
autorecovery of configurations
export of same backend multiple times
physical-to-virtual migration tool and
configuration assistant tools.
Other features and multiple bug fixes also have been implemented. LDoms 1.2 software is supported on the OpenSolaris 2009.06 release, Solaris 10 05/09 and earlier Solaris 10 patched versions.
The need to develop data archiving capabilities is a challenge that every enterprise faces these days for any or all of several needs: whether to accommodate explosive data growth; to respond to the pressure to meet promised service levels and backup windows for users; to provide archive data retention and retrieval requirements; and to better manage rising energy costs. Dean Halbeisen’s Sun BluePrints Online paper “Sun Systems for Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup Software” details the openly architected, intelligent and massively scalable general purpose archive solutions Sun is developing to assist enterprise users in meeting these challenges.
