ISV/IHV Engineering News ISV Engineering

ISV Engineering's Dr. Christoph Brune has written an excellent summary of Sun's virtualization offerings that help to increase datacenter utilization for SAP deployments.   He points out that surveys have consistently shown that most datacenters only achieve about 10-15% average server utilization.   Then he describes the broad and deep set of offerings from Sun that helps to maximize datacenter efficiency and utilization for SAP installations.   Sun's virtualization platform for SAP Systems includes five key areas.   From the article:

1. Virtual Desktops: Replace traditional PCs with virtual machines that you can manage from the data center.
2. Consolidated SAP Server landscape: Multisocket, multicore, multithreaded servers from Sun can handle the workloads of multiple SAP applications and their tiers, consolidating the SAP environment so you need fewer physical machines.
3. Partitioned servers: Sun presents a comprehensive offering of virtualization technologies, such as Dynamic Domains, Logical Domains, Solaris Containers, and the Sun xVM Server, providing highly isolated and secure environments at the hardware and OS levels.
   
4. Cross-platform virtualization management: Technologies such as Sun xVM Ops Center provision and manage pools of resources that users can share and allocate to many SAP instances.
5. Cost-effective datastorage & management: Products like Solaris ZFS and Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage pool resources to manage storage as a single resource, which decreases the burden of managing large tape libraries, increases system usage and efficiency, and reduces the overall cost of protecting SAP data through improved tape utilization,
   shared tape resources, and reduced complexity.
   

Read the full article in the SAP NetWeaver Magazine or the pdf link here.   Even more about SAP and Sun Microsystems virtualization solutions can be found here.