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20060515 Monday May 15, 2006

Merry Christmas ! Yes, we are Serious (plus how to build a new Datacenter today)

Life running the Vodafone business at Sun, do you spot what's odd?
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Yesterday, we finally had our Teams Christmas dinner - on May 8th. We had to miss it around christmas this year because of a major tender and eAuction we had to cover. Well, admittedly, we won't make this our future business outfit:
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By the way, thats how a Global Programme Director, Andy Ashwell, looks like during a christmas party - maybe it's the Army Background? Thank you for the picture Andy, you sure know how to party.
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What kept us busy so much over the last 9 months or so, is a major initiative in Datacenter Consolidation, automation and standardization.
How would you build and operate such a new datacenter? A couple of key points drive a new design:
  • Standardize your System builds and create a catalogue of components you want to use - restrict yourself as much as possible.
    • How about small (T2000 (UltraSparc T1, how about getting one for a Free 60 Day Trial?), X4100 (Opteron, also available for a Free 60 Day Trial!) or Blade Systems), Medium (v890 (UltraSPARC IV+), 4 Socket Opteron Standalone or Blade System) and E25k (UltraSPARC IV+, yes, big databases still just run best on big SMP servers)
  • Sun's CoolThreads Servers (did I mention the FREE 60 Day trial yet?) based on the UltraSparc T1 Processors (those nice, power efficient 32- Thread CPUs) for the front end. Webservers, Java, Application Servers, certain Databases will rock on these.
  • Mid-sized and High End UltraSparc Servers as well as Sun's AMD Opteron Based servers and Blades for the Back End.
  • Create standard Architectures / Building Blocks with a well defined set of properties (TCO cost, performance, scalability, availability, recoverability, ...) (Let Olaf know if you want any of these reference architectures, we have them all ready and nicely written up now)
  • Every load a project is anticipating is mapped to a standard architecture using pre-defined metrics
  • Build Resource pools of of your Standard Systems, and manage them using Automated Provisioning of OS and Services on top (Sun's N1 Product Suite) and virtualization (Solaris 10 and Containers)
  • Drive a mapping of project to resource pools, not project based acquisition of resources
  • Sun's ATCA standard Netra Blades for the Network, Sparc and Opteron Blades!
  • Satisfy your High Availability and Disaster recovery requirements with Sun Cluster, Sun Cluster Geographic Edition and Sun's StorageTek Tape and ILM Products

By the way, did you know that Oracle's primary development Platform for x86 is Solaris, and that Oracle on Solaris and Sun Cluster is the best and most proven choice?

And although it seems like a small list, its a fundamental change to how almost everybody operates today - the organizational and procedural changes required to implement such a modern, lowest-TCO Datacenter are big and need to be taken into account as well. Success is not achieved by buying the right Systems - its making a new architecture and process alive in the Organization.

Maybe it will be Christmas Dinner in May again next year... Merry Christmas,

Olaf

PS: Does anybody read this far? If yes, please leave a comment down here!

Posted by mobiletechnology ( May 15 2006, 12:35:46 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [1]