Earlier this month, Sun began to offer Logical Domains (LDoms) for its
CoolThreads servers. LDoms, which Sun unveiled last October, is a
server virtualization and partitioning technology supported on Sun
servers which use UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) and future chip
multi-threading (CMT) processors developed by Sun. LDoms run on the
free and open source Solaris OS which has a larger installed-base than
any other commercial UNIX or Linux distribution on the planet.
So why should customers care about virtualization?
It's estimated that the average server only utilizes 5 to 15% of its capability. The wasted expense of buying multiple servers (server sprawl) should be obvious. But this inefficiency also contributes to the growing energy cost of running a data center.
LDoms help to solve these problems by making it easy for customers to utilize the entire server. It achieves this by running independent "virtual machines" on the server; Sun can deliver up to 32 LDoms per server. The bottomline benefit for customers? Sun estimates that LDoms can save up to $10,000 per server: and the more servers that are virtualized, the higher the savings and the greater the benefits.
Offering both LDoms and Solaris Containers (that enable you to run multiple OS's simultaneously on a single CoolThreads server), Sun's virtualization offerings -- spanning from the server level, the network level, the desktop, and storage solutions -- are looking strong and worth further investigation
So why should customers care about virtualization?
It's estimated that the average server only utilizes 5 to 15% of its capability. The wasted expense of buying multiple servers (server sprawl) should be obvious. But this inefficiency also contributes to the growing energy cost of running a data center.
LDoms help to solve these problems by making it easy for customers to utilize the entire server. It achieves this by running independent "virtual machines" on the server; Sun can deliver up to 32 LDoms per server. The bottomline benefit for customers? Sun estimates that LDoms can save up to $10,000 per server: and the more servers that are virtualized, the higher the savings and the greater the benefits.
Offering both LDoms and Solaris Containers (that enable you to run multiple OS's simultaneously on a single CoolThreads server), Sun's virtualization offerings -- spanning from the server level, the network level, the desktop, and storage solutions -- are looking strong and worth further investigation