Summa

During the course of a corporate portal upgrade project, we were able to reduce the new hardware budget by 50% of the original estimate. We were also able to reduce the customer’s original software licensing and support costs by 50% of their previous operating environment while creating four new additional operating environments — three of which were clustered. This was done by leveraging Solaris 10 zones and sub-capacity licensing.

This project was proof that virtualization is becoming more important, especially in tough economic times. People are being asked to do more with less, IT managers are being asked to cut budgets while at the same time delivering value to the organization. When people talk about virtualization these days, VMWare is what typically comes to mind first. Although, there are several other virtualization options available. Here’s a story about how we were able to achieve significant cost savings for one of our customers in 2008.

The original environments consisted of a single development server and a clustered production environment. As part of this project we expanded this configuration to include development, test, and production servers for both a corporate intranet and a business partner extranet, six environments in all, four of them clustered.

Based on the number of new environments, we couldn’t justify the costs based on the amount of hardware which would have been required if we did not use some form of virtualization strategy. We selected Solaris 10 and its built-in Zones functionality because the customer preferred to use Sun Solaris and Zones functionality is built into the operating system at no additional cost.

Solaris 10 Zones also allowed us to configure the systems with processor caps for each virtual environment. Since we were able to cap the number of CPUs per environment we could then take advantage of the software vendor’s sub-capacity licensing feature. Sub-capacity licensing allowed us to only have to license the CPUs where the portal product was actually being used. We did some creative configuration with the CPUs to maximize the system’s overall performance without mixing loads between production and non-production instances.

Based on this project and several other projects where we have utilized virtualization technologies, I would argue that customers with more than two servers (always have a fail-over) should be considering some form of virtualization strategy whether it’s VMWare, Xen, WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, or Solaris 10 Zones. In this particular case, Solaris 10 combined with IBM sub-capacity licensing was the right fit for this customer’s specific needs.