Virtualization, Consolidation, Gre(en Re)volution VirtualOne

With so much power packed into this box, the T5440 is an ideal system to start consolidating hundreds of applications onto a single T5440 using massively scalable Solaris Containers and LDOMs, & virtualize traditional mid-range applications such as OLTP databases, CRM, ERP and other business applications. Consolidation with T5440, will help save space, power and on top of everything, cost of maintenance - leading to even more affordability in the current economic situation.The T5440 is ideally suited for financial services, telecom and other environments requiring extreme consolidation, exceptional availability, and unmatched performance.

Energy efficient chip multi-threading (CMT) product family from Sun has led to GREEN data centers across the world. CMT family  (aka Niagara, Huron, Victoria Falls) has experienced tremendous momentum since its introduction in 2006. Today, Sun is announcing highly anticipated Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server (code name: Batoka) based on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor.

With the World economy down the drain, T5440 provides a ray of hope for enterprises and datacenters. It brings all the benefits of T2000 to midrange computing : outstanding performance, energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness that has only previously been available in the volume space.  While traditional midrange computers were once hundreds of thousands of dollars, the T5440 starts at just a fraction of the price. A whole new class of server is now available to emerging markets to grow both our current and new customer base -- making it affordable.

So, go GREEN and go ECONOMIC with T5440.

And, oh! don't forget the Try-n-Buy offer from Sun.

Cheers! 

"The best practice for enhancing network connectivity is to configure multiple physical paths to the network so that if a network adapter, cable, or upstream switch fails due to equipment problems or human error, the second path continues to carry traffic. Redundant physical connections must be complemented with software that can fail over between links in the event of an error. The Solaris Operating System supports IP multipathing (IPMP). This allows a system to be configured to automatically fail over a group of IP addresses hosted on multiple interfaces while load sharing outbound traffic across all available links." explains Peter Wilson in his white paper "LDOMS I/O Best Practices - Network Availability With Logical Domains".

The white paper is the second of two Sun BluePrints Online papers by Peter who works with Sun's Systems Technical Marketing group. The blueprint article discusses the  approaches and trade-offs for increasing network availability using multipathing between physical and virtual network. It contains:

• Network Availability Overview
• Configuring Network Availability
• Configuring IPMP with Two I/O Domains
• Configuring IPMP in a Single I/O Domain

It is a very well written blueprint for effective networking with LDOMs.

Virtualization is no more a hype. It is already happening. Sun has variety of products that help with virtualiazation and consolidation. For example,

• Zones/Containers
• Logicam Domains (LDOMs)
• xVM Server (Hypervisor)
• xVM Ops Center
• xVM VirtualBox
• xVM VDI.

LDOMs is FW layer that sits between bare metal and OSes.  Saju has very nicely has blogged on how to create and install LDOMs.