Finding a balance between the benefits of IT services and the costs associated with running them makes taking a TCO-focused approach worth consideration since it can result in long term, sustainable savings through improved efficiencies without reducing functionality. With this in mind, a Sun white paper discusses typical datacenter inefficiencies, commonly used strategies to resolve them, and how available technologies, like the Sun Ops Center, can lower costs over the lifecycle of a solution. This allows consumers to spend more money during the initial investment while still receiving higher returns on that same investment (ROI).

The Sun Ops Center is a comprehensive and highly scalable management solution for both physical and virtual systems. In addition to managing Sun's x86 and SPARC servers, the latest version of Ops Center 2.5 extends lifecycle management capabilities to Sun's built-in virtualization technologies, including Solaris Containers and Sun Logical Domains (LDoms). By using advanced technologies and built-in automated workflows, Ops Center 2.5 allows users to maintain consistent deployment of firmware, OS, and applications across physical and virtual resources, speed deployment time, as well as improve business continuity by quickly provisioning new systems and dynamically allocating resources. From a single and intuitive browser-based console, Ops Center 2.5 automates and controls Sun infrastructure as well as heterogeneous environments running the Solaris, Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL).

This white paper examines how the Sun Ops Center addresses monitoring frameworks, point-in-time provisioning - specifically OS provisioning tasks, software lifecycle management, and virtualization management - and how its approach is quite cost-efficient. One point the paper makes is that a lower cost for a solution across its lifecycle - from purchase to decommission - often necessitates a higher initial price point. So, decision-makers should keep in mind that an increased initial purchase price makes financial sense if the savings in TCO offset the initial cost increment.

A business case for the Sun Ops Center is presented with an outline of its benefits along with suggested assumption of savings that can be realized. Initial cost of a solution is normally the single, most dominant consideration for purchasers.

The paper asserts that driving down operational cost in the datacenter through automation focused on reducing TCO is increasingly significant. It cites a specific example of anecdotal evidence illustrating this point. CNET reported that by using a software solution with some of the benefits of Sun Ops Center, user to technical support ratio more than doubled - from 60 users to 1 technical support engineer to 125 to 1.

More Information

Sun Ops Center: Changing the Economics of Datacenter Operations

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