A recent 65-page, Sun white paper, White Paper: System and Resource Management, explains how the software and hardware features of the Sun SPARC Enterprise servers can be used to maximize business value by consolidating applications.
Here is the table of contents for the White Paper:
Hardware Alone is Not Enough
Managing Sun SPARC Enterprise Servers
- eXtended System Controller Facility (XSCF)
- Sun Management Center software
- Solaris Management Console
- Configuration and Service Tracker
- Sun Net Connect services
- Solaris Operating System—support for manageability
- Sun xVM Ops Center
- SNMP Service
Managing Resources and Domains
- Dynamic Domains
- Dynamic Reconfiguration
- Capacity on Demand
- I/O Box
Fine-Grained Resource Management
- Solaris Containers
- Solaris Resource Manager
Managing Other Resources, Monitoring, and Accounting
- Solaris Process Rights Management software
- Resource capping daemon
- IPQoS
- IP Multipathing
- Managing storage resources in Solaris Zones
- Solaris Fibre Channel (FC) and Storage Multipathing software
- Monitoring and accounting
Overview
The Sun SPARC Enterprise servers are the most powerful and innovative enterprise-class systems available from Sun today. With the ability to partition the system into sub-board level domains, isolate applications into containers, and manage resources with fine-grained and dynamic control, the systems are ideally suited for consolidating applications and optimally utilizing resources.
Borrowing from the mainframe world, the systems also include GUI-based tools for administering, monitoring, and managing the hardware, operating system, storage, and applications. These tools streamline and automate many tasks, thus decreasing complexity and IT operations costs, while providing a more consistent environment.
In today's exceedingly competitive environment, where profit margins continue to shrink, every IT department operates under the mandate to reduce complexity, reduce costs, increase return on investment, provide a more consistent environment to support compliance initiatives, and quickly adapt to changes in demand and business processes. By consolidating applications onto Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, IT departments can do all of this, and more.
Hardware Alone is Not Enough
The Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, with their complement of management tools, are designed specifically as general-purpose application, database, data warehousing, and consolidation servers. They are especially suited to address the needs of enterprise datacenters with a goal of increasing performance and flexibility, while consolidating systems to reduce datacenter costs and complexity.
The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000-64 server offers the highest availability, highest absolute performance, highest scalability, and the most sophisticated control of resources in Sun's extensive server product line.
Managing Sun SPARC Enterprise Servers
Sun understands the difficult task that IT operators face today. Managers of large systems look for ways to automate, integrate, and quickly adapt in order to manage ever-increasing and changing workloads. That's why Sun set out to create a set of more powerful management tools that simplify administration through streamlined procedures capable of enhancing existing skill sets.
Managing Resources and Domains
Delivering computing services over the Internet brings with it an emphasis for IT operations staff to find ways to economically provide needed levels of service such as throughput, availability, and response time. Sun offers powerful features to help control resource utilization on the Sun SPARC Enterprise servers by partitioning the system's resources into isolated domains and providing a process to dynamically reconfigure those resources to meet changing demands.
Fine-Grained Resource Management
Traditionally, dedicated servers are configured to match the peak resource needs of a single, critical application. Solaris Containers help enable application consolidation on Sun SPARC Enterprise servers and more efficient system utilization through granular resource management within the server domains.
Managing Other Resources, Monitoring, and Accounting
Resource management helps ensure that the applications that are consolidated and running on a single system (as well as single application servers) meet required response times and service levels. The Solaris 10 Operating System includes a variety of features for managing, monitoring, and accounting for usage of memory, network bandwidth, and storage resources between multiple applications running on the same system. It also includes a facility to assign rights to processes.
More Information
White Paper: System and Resource Management
Sun SPARC Enterprise Servers
Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 Server
Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 Server
Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 Server
Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server
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