The City of San Antonio (CoSA) allows its residents to pay a traffic ticket, apply for a job, or find information about 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.

CoSA decided to consolidate its SAP NetWeaver systems — including SAP ERP 6.0 applications and Business Warehouse 3.5 — and other N-Tier Oracle 10g database applications on Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 and M4000 servers. The SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers provide up to four dynamic domains with assignment flexibility. CoSA also migrated from the Solaris 9 Operating System to the Solaris 10 OS to take advantage of Solaris Zones, so multiple applications can run in isolation from one another on the same physical hardware.

The solution also includes Sun Blade 6000 Modular Systems, and multiple Sun Fire T2000 servers with energy-efficient CoolThreads technology. CoSA also replaced 80 physical Windows servers with 12 Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers as a VMWare virtual infrastructure platform in its Windows environment. Altogether, the City consolidated or replaced approximately 115 servers with 26 compact, energy-efficient servers from Sun.

With these Sun servers and virtualization technology, CoSA has consolidated from 16 to 4 racks of servers and reduced the datacenter footprint for these workloads by over 85%. Previously, it could take a week or more to deploy a physical server, but now it takes half an hour to set up a Solaris Zone, giving administrators more time for deploying new systems that benefit the City.

CoSA has also realized a nearly three-fold performance improvement with the SAP application and database workloads redistributed across the M4000 and M5000 servers. The SAP system response time fell well below the threshold of negatively impacting end-user effectiveness, translating into increased productivity and a higher ROI for the City’s SAP solution.

Cost savings from the Sun solution are evident in CoSA's drop in overall datacenter energy consumption by approximately 15% through the use of fewer and more energy-efficient systems, while its increase in workload count went up over 30%. Most importantly, CoSA has gained control of its server infrastructure while continuing to grow services for the people of San Antonio.

“We’re very happy with our solution,” says Cathryn Major, administrator on the CoSA UNIX team. “If our database administrators have a choice, they want an Oracle database and they want it to run on Sun technology.”

Kevin Goodwin, assistant director, CoSA Information Technology Services Department, commented, "Sun’s enterprise-class virtualization technologies have served the City of San Antonio well. They’re a critical component of our overall IT transformation and optimization strategy, allowing us to rapidly deploy highly available server capacity to meet the City’s changing business needs while saving money in the process."

More Information

Customer Snapshot: City of San Antonio

Sun in Government articles

Sun Fire X4600 M2 Server

Sun Blade 6000 Modular System

Sun Blade T6320 Server Modules

Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 Server

Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 Server

Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 Server

Solaris 10 Operating System

SunSpectrum Support [...read more...]

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