It's time to pay attention to Sun's x86 server biz
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Fresh gear beats rivals The fresh Xeon-based servers from Sun mark the companyâs most muscular play to date in the x86 realm. The four-socket 2U X4450, in particular, has Sun pushing the equivalent of a midrange SMP down into the heart of the so-called âcommodityâ market. This move plays well with Sunâs historic strengths in the SMP (symmetric multi-processing) arena and supports Sunâs âR&amp;D will winâ mantra.â¦
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Operating system to come at no charge for servers with x86 processors. But the bug fixes will cost you.
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Company looks to leap past current limit of eight Opteron processors in a single server.
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SUN ANNOUNCED THE UltraSPARC IV+ this morning, most probably the last of its line. Sun will be taking a new direction from this point on, with the new Fujitsu co-developed chips being a definite step sideways
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Capacity planners, performance gurus, and Computer Measurement Group members, your day may dawn once again as server virtualization turns the practice of throwing hardware at problems into a counterproductive task.
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(InfoWorld) - The problem may not rival the movies Poltergeist or The Amityville Horror for sheer terror, but CIOs and datacenter managers are still well advised to deal decisively with so-called ghost servers. Like celluloid zombies, these forgotten pieces of equipment are dead when it comes to improving the bottom line, but they are very much alive when it comes to eating up IT budgets. The unproductive -- and usually undocumented -- servers take up valuable real estate, consume increasingly expensive electricity and, in some cases, absorb ongoing maintenance and lease payments. "You can find ghost servers in a lot of enterprises," says John Phelps, an analyst at Gartner. "And the larger and more diverse the company, the harder it can be to have a single group or technology platform that provides control over all corporate assets." Sun Microsystems, through case studies of two large corporate datacenter operations and anecdotal analysis of efforts with many customers, believes that 8 percent to 10 percent of all servers in large corporations have no identifiable function. In the two datacenter studies, 150 ghost servers were found in an installation of 1,800 servers, and 354 ghost servers were found in an installation of 3,500 servers. One of the companies studied was Sun itself. Sun used system performance tools to monitor CPU utilization and I/O and network traffic, collecting the data over the course of a month, and sorted out machines with zero utilization. Sun removed the questionable servers from operation for 90 days to determine any impact. At the end of the period, it found that 60 percent of the servers could be permanently decommissioned, says Mark Monroe, director of sustainable computing at Sun. The company now conducts quarterly reviews of utilization rates. "It's hard to get people to admit they have unused infrastructure," Monroe says. "It's expensive, wasteful, and having a CIO admit he's got millions of dollars of idle assets lying around could get a guy fired. I think we can remove some of the stigma by talking about the facts, and having people realize it's worse just to leave them lying around." Corporations need to admit "they are like everyone else" and try to reduce the number of idle machines to 3 percent or less, "which is three times better than the industry average," he says. The cost of running a server for three years exceeds its original acquisition cost, so keeping the ghost servers around has an easily measured effect in energy savings. Identifying and eliminating wasted resources are key components of green or "eco-computing," Monroe says. The good news: Advances in asset management and configuration software can help businesses find and shut down these useless machines. And more companies are being proactive when it comes to adopting policies in this area. A survey of more than 300 businesses in the U.S. and Europe conducted by Gartner in 2006 found that 74 percent of respondents said they have a formal software and hardware asset management program. More advanced autodiscovery capabilities and more efficient, effective and accurate search engines mean "there has recently been more focus on discovering the lost and unidentified equipment, especially in industries where security concerns are growing," says Richard Ptak, analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates. "Every major company I've ever dealt with has had the problem to some level." When BlueCross BlueShield of Florida (BCBSF), which provides insurance services for nearly 9 million people, decided to build a new datacenter in 2005, the company also felt it was time to get a comprehensive look at its asset inventory, says Paul Stallings, senior manager for provisioning services. In addition to the new and existing datacenters, BCBSF also has about 10 smaller server rooms in various locations around the state. The server room equipment was being managed by different departments within the insurance provider, and each had a different way of tracking and documenting assets, Stallings says. Using Aperture Technologies' VISTA tool beginning in late 2005, BCBSF began documenting its IT resources under a single umbrella. "There were definitely undocumented assets," Stallings says. "When you have seven or eight teams managing the hardware, each using a different process, there was really no way to get a systemwide understanding of what we had in our various datacenters." By getting a complete view of its asset inventory, BCBSF has been able to create a formal decommissioning process. When a system needs to be retired, a workflow ticket is automatically generated. The IT department can then start to reclaim floor space, remove cabling and place old servers in pool of equipment that can be either redeployed or completely removed from the environment. As one of largest IT services providers in the world, Fujitsu Services operates seven Fujitsu-owned datacenters in the U.K. with more than 200,000 sq. ft. of floor space, and manages 11 customer-owned facilities. As a result of its outsourcing business, the company has acquired datacenter facilities and IT equipment from a variety of sources, and much of the equipment came with no asset or configuration management process in place, says Mark Scott, global datacenter delivery manager at Fujitsu Services. The company had previously used a configuration cataloging system that recorded only the location of equipment on the floor, but it did not provide any insight into specific use of the equipment. In attempt to get a comprehensive inventory and create an asset management strategy that would allow it to maximize existing datacenter space and continue to grow, Fujitsu Services began working with Aperture to deploy its VISTA datacenter resource management system in 2005, and the company began to see a variety of issues that were wasting resources. "We found we had IT equipment on the floor that people within the company had thought we had gotten rid of years ago," he says. "We looked deeper and found out we were also still paying lease and maintenance on the equipment. We even found that we were paying lease and maintenance on equipment that been removed from our datacenters." By extending the asset management systems across its entire U.K.-based datacenter operation, Fujitsu Services has reduced its operational costs and then passed the savings on to customers, Scott says. Since customers are generally charged for the floor space they use within the datacenters, the removal of unproductive equipment has allowed Fujitsu Services to reduce specific hosting charges for those customers. So, for example, if Fujitsu can reduce the footprint by 10 percent, Scott says that 10 percent savings can be passed along to the customer. The company is also developing the ability to invoice for the actual power required by individual customer installations, versus the current practice of invoicing for power based on the floor space used by the servers. "We also found lots of badly installed equipment," Scott says. The poor installation processes had led to what he characterized as vulnerabilities that meant his company had difficulties meeting customer uptime requirements. "The result was really that we had actually built vulnerabilities into the operation. It was a real wake-up call. We now have a complete vulnerability check and can control installations from the beginning to end." Alticor, the parent company for such businesses as Amway, Quixtar, and Access Business Group, handles IT demands for affiliates all over the world, says Randy Gast, supervisor of server technology at Alticor. The company uses a combination of management tools to keep track of its software and hardware assets, including BMC Software's Remedy service management and Hewlett-Packard's Systems Insight Manager. Using the software, Alticor early last year found that more than 200 servers, or about a third of its 650 x86 processor-based servers, were running at utilization rates of 10 percent or less, Gast says. Even scarier, these underused servers had accumulated without IT knowledge, over the previous three years as new equipment was bought to handle individual applications or affiliate requirements. Working with virtualization specialist VMware, Alticor has embarked on an effort to consolidate the unproductive system and increase overall utilization rates to between 60 percent and 70 percent, Gast says. To date, Alticor has consolidated 150 of the unproductive servers onto seven servers using virtualization software. Alticor has donated the majority of the servers it has taken out of operation during the consolidation effort to charitable organizations. Servers that were too old to be used by groups such as local schools and churches have been sold for scrap. "Using Remedy, we can track the lease agreements for our hardware, when they start and expire, and use it to have automatic triggers that let us know we need to consider replacing certain equipment," Gast says. That said, there is generally a great deal of inefficiency regarding how customers get rid of old gear. "A lot of businesses don't have a disposition strategy, primarily because it's easier to buy" new servers than dispose of the old ones, says Daniel Ransdell, general manager of IBM's Global Asset Recovery Solutions business unit. "Even if you've unplugged the equipment and stuck it in some closet or corner, the business is losing the opportunity to recoup value. Servers aren't like fine wine. They don't get better with age." Energy cost is the major issue that is changing attitudes inside corporations. In August, the Environmental Protection Agency published a report that documented datacenter power usage. According to the report, datacenters in the U.S. consumed about 60 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, or about 1.5 percent of total electricity consumption in the country. The EPA points out that datacenter energy use has doubled in the past five years, and is expected to double again in the next five years to an annual cost of about $7.4 billion. The EPA says existing technologies and strategies could reduce typical sever energy use by 25 percent, and even greater savings are possible using more advanced technologies. Rockwell Bonecutter, head of datacenter technology and operations at Accenture, believes that a large percentage of the ghost server problem was alleviated when most businesses engaged in extensive Y2k efforts within their infrastructure. In the intervening years, however, there has been a significant growth of systems that operate at 5 percent utilization or less, often because of poor communication and asset management within the company. "When it comes to servers that nobody knows about that are sitting for years and nobody has touched, there are probably examples in every IT environment, but it's obviously impossible to measure what you don't know exists," Bonecutter says. "What we have found is that it is not unusual to find that 40 percent of all servers on a floor could be consolidated and virtualized out of the environment." Consolidation through virtualization has also led to the new phenomena of virtual ghost servers. The ease and quickness with which virtual servers can be created can often leave servers cluttered with numerous poorly documented virtual machines created for short-term or abandoned projects. With tools allowing businesses to get a more holistic view of their assets and policies in place to guide a formal decommissioning process, businesses can now reduce the risk and associated costs of ghost servers, without the need to call on the aid of another great Hollywood institution, Ghostbusters. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate. Darrell Dunn is a freelance reporter in Fort Worth, Texas, with 20 years of experience covering business technology and enterprise IT. Contact him at darrelldunn@sbcglobal.net.
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Slaps software on new Unix boxen IBM thinks it can slice the hell out of a server. In fact, it looks to use virtualization as a major weapon against Unix rivals Sun Microsystems and HP and against x86 vendors. Don't believe us? Then witness the PowerVM branding exercise.â¦
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Delivering the capabilities of traditional EAI products within a light-footprint, standards-based infrastructure supporting incremental integration
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Ziff Davis - Sun's plans to offer Solaris code to the open-source community leaves some analysts scratching their heads.
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Sun Microsystems on Tuesday unveiled Version 7 of the companyâs enterprise development tool suite, Sun Java Studio Enterprise, and previewed a JVM that will support 64-bit AMD Opteron processors.
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Sun Microsystems will hold its quarterly product launch this week, unleashing a raft of new hardware offerings spanning servers to storage.
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BREAKING NEWS - Sun Microsystems has become the latest server manufacturer to offer Windows Server operating systems pre-installed on x64 servers, as well as what Sun's EVP John Fowler described this afternoon, during a press conference call, as "the entirety of our server line."
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InfoWorld - Adding spark to its&#160;Sun Fire line&#160;of servers, Sun Microsystems&#160;is expected to announced its first x86-based quad-core systems Tuesday .
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Sun&#39;s COO Jonathan Schwartz has outlined a new direction for his company in the form of a cycle farm. Such a farm would rent out CPU time by the hour for a nominal charge - 99 cents for the use of a dual CPU
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(InfoWorld) - Adding spark to itsÂ Sun Fire lineÂ on servers, Sun MicrosystemsÂ is expected to announced its first x86-based quad-core systems Tuesday . The Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4150 rack-mount servers are the second and third Intel-based products Sun is releasing after the companies signed a partnership early this year.Â Sun shipped an Intel-based blade server, Sun Blade X6250, in June. The X4450 is a four-socket, 2U server powered byÂ Intel's quad-core Xeon 7300 processors, while the 1U Sun Fire X4150 is a two-socket server powered by Intel's quad-core Xeon 5300 processors. Both servers offer memory capacity ranging from 2GB to 128GB. Starting at $8,895, the X4450 server will ship worldwide in October, said Rebecca Tong, product line manager at Sun. The X4150, starting at $2,995, will ship in the U.S. this month and worldwide in October. The X4450 and X4150 will also support Intel's 7200 and 5100 dual-core processors, respectively. The servers will ship with the embedded Lights Out Manager, a system controller that helps users manage and administer servers. The servers will run either Sun Solaris, Linux, or Windows 2003 OSes and support VMware's virtualization software. Sun is looking to add support forÂ Microsoft's Virtual Server virtualization software, Tong said. Targeted at organizations that need performance and energy efficiency, the servers offer better size, performance and energy efficiency than competing products, Tong said. Sun's rivals in the x86 server space include IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell. The servers not only nurtures Sun's ties with Intel, but also provides more choice to customers looking to buy x86-based servers, said a Sun spokeswoman. Sun has strong ties with AMD, which recently announced its Barcelona quad-core Opteron chip. Sun will announce servers using the Barcelona chip in the future, the company said. Sun already offers the multicore UltraSparc T2 processor which has up to eight cores per processor. Developers and staff at Eastern Michigan University have benefitted from the X4450 server, said Bill Heilman, a platform specialist at the university. Equipped with four quad-core Intel Xeon 7300 processors and 64GB of RAM, the server has provided the virtualization environment the university was seeking and is especially powerful in the Unix environment, Heilman said. The university is running VMWare ESX Server beta virtualization software and Solaris 9 OS on the X4450. Additionally, the server's slim footprint has provided additional benefits. "Not only is it small, it uses a little less juice," he said, which will save the university money on electric bills, Heilman said.
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Sun plans to release most of the OS code to an open-source community development process. The company also promises a Red Hat Linux execution environment (the Janus project) by 1Q05.
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Sun Microsystems is readying an upgrade to its enterprise-level application server and is touting new downloading figures as evidence of the companyâs growing presence in the application server market.