A Sun-based solution was chosen by Al Yousuf L.L.C., a diversified private sector business located in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to migrate its existing data center in preparation for future expansion initiatives that will require an increase in IT capacity.

Sun hardware, software, enterprise SAN storage, networking and training services were selected based on the return-of-investment and expedient delivery response times.

Another determining factor was the expertise of Sun partner Mideast Data Systems (MDS), which was involved in implementing the new infrastructure, according to Mousallam Chatty, director of IT with Al Yousuf L.L.C.

Chatty stated that Al Yousuf's diverse business activities, management and users' demands required a powerful, easy-to-manage IT environment securely reliant upon a dependable infrastructure.

"We needed more processing power, which you don't really get from changing the servers only, so the entire Data Center infrastructure had to be revised," said Chatty. "The Sun environment has enabled us to improve our processing times and overall IT performance at a very cost-effective investment level."

Al Yousuf's applications are developed in-house. Therefore, this upgrade required that current applications needed to be appropriately adjusted to respond to the more powerful Oracle 9i optimizer that was replacing the former Oracle database 7.

"The aim was to boost the Data Center's performance by 10. After the upgrade, we could push the live system performance by 60 times," Chatty said. "Some of the DSS queries used to take 7-8 hours, but now response time is down to 7-8 minutes, while some of our OLTP queries which used to take 2-3 minutes, we brought it down to 1 second. That is 150 times faster on average."

Supporting the company's extensive array of applications are two Sun FireTM V880 servers and one Sun FireTM 280 server. Al Yousuf's complete data center runs on the SolarisTM Operating System (Solaris OS).

Also implemented to protect and manage the vast amount of data generated by Al Yousuf's different branches and business units is a Sun StorEdgeTM 9900 series of enterprise storage system that includes hardware and software, as well as the VERITAS NetBackup solution.

"Sun's customers across the region are primarily fast-growing, diverse organizations that face the challenge of managing vast amounts of data generated by customers, partners, and employees," said Mehmet Iyimen, managing director with Sun's Middle East & North Africa division. "Al Yousuf has enabled its business needs to drive the company's technology roadmap across all of its diverse operations. This strategy should increase Al Yousuf's ability to make informed decisions across its entire enterprise while reducing the administrative and operational costs associated with its IT division." [...read more...]

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