Historical investments of this nature have led to server sprawl and utilization rates that frequently fall below 15 percent. Since no two organizations have the same type of workload (and workloads shift dynamically) or use system resources in the same way, the problem of provisioning resources on a shared system can be tricky.

Server consolidation should obviously reduce total capital investment costs, lower system management expenses, and decrease software and hardware maintenance fees by minimizing the total number of systems required. Unfortunately, these efficiencies haven't been fully realized due to a gap between conceptualization and actualization.

Sun's vision is that technology can be used to deliver business services through a single pool of resources — simultaneously decreasing the costs associated with server footprint and increasing utilization rates.

Creating and managing this pool of resources requires server virtualization, a concept that allows servers and the network to be flexibly portioned into independent, completely dynamic execution environments within the same server and physical network. The recently announced Solaris 10 Operating Environment takes resource sharing to levels previously not available within the industry — narrowing the aforementioned gap between conception and utilization.  [pagebreak]

Not withstanding the obvious reasons why Sun would tout its own technology over that of its competitors, the potential costs savings Sun offers makes the concept a viable alternative. With the Solaris 10 OS, Sun introduced Solaris Containers, a key element in resource sharing, to provide secure, full resource containment and control for more predictable services levels.

Solaris Containers offers platform independence, something Sun's competitors don't provide, and are available on servers from one to more than 100 CPUs. The Solaris 10 Operating Environment runs on SPARC, x86, and AMD Opteron platforms, providing an enormous advantage for scalability.

To fully appreciate the costs savings available from Sun's innovation, let's examine a typical scenario. Prior to consolidation, assuming a company is supporting 20 applications, it will have 20 instances of the OS and 20 hardware servers. Using other consolidation partitioning technologies, the company could have 20 instances of the OS and one server, reducing maintenance and acquisition costs.

With Solaris Containers, the company will have one OS and one server, significantly reducing administration (the single largest contributor to costs), maintenance costs, and total cost of ownership.

Users can create as many as 4000 containers in one instance of the operating system. The potential savings offered by Solaris Containers from administration costs alone differentiates Sun's answer to server consolidation from its competitors.

Sun offers a breakthrough to virtualization and software partitioning, extending the paradigm to create an execution environment for applications and services within a single instance of the Solaris OS. With this innovation, companies can support application, development, testing, staging, training, and production activities from one server as completely independent environments.

The benefit of this approach lies in the fact that each environment maintains its own identity, separate from the underlying hardware, yet behaves as if it is running on its own fully secure system, supporting completely dynamic consolidation. Increasing IT efficiency and hardware utilization is key to the success of the enterprise. Sun may have the answers, and it's certainly upping the ante against the competition by providing the Solaris 10 OS free of charge.

Thomas Croft is a senior UNIX system administrator, network security manager, and senior software Web architect for TelE-Publishing Inc. [1].