In Aparna Kumar's experience with startups, a universal goal when considering their IT environment is getting better utilization of their computing resources. Virtualization is a common solution. Along this line of thinking, Kumar wants readers of his blog to consider that a company might want to look into changing their operating system to Solaris in order to meet this goal and then some.

"Hardware partitioning is a definitive solution but its expensive & often works well on high end systems," Kumar remarks. "What Solaris does is to provide this feature as an inherent part of the operating system without cost, without performance overheads and with ease of configuration & management."

When thinking about consolidating and virtualizing an environment, the Sun OS offers Solaris Container or Zones technology. Kumar attempts to plainly describe the technology by defining Solaris Zones as a virtual operating system abstraction that provides a protected environment in which applications run. The applications are protected from each other to provide software fault isolation. To ease the labor of managing multiple applications and their environments, they co-exist within one operating system instance, and are usually managed as one entity. A Solaris Container is simply a zone which also uses the operating system's resource management facility. Containers minimize the number of servers utilized, which in turn, minimizes space, power/cooling requirements and cost.

He offers links and resources for those interested in learning more about the Solaris platform and its features.

More Information

[url "Startup conversations: Consolidation, utilization, virtualization"] - Kumar's blog entry

Solaris Virtualization [...read more...]

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