Best Practices for Managing

Data Center Costs via Application

and Server Consolidation
Server sprawl, software license fees, and facilities costs are sending data
center operational expenses through the roof at a time when every penny is
being scrutinized. Low utilization rates and wasted power/cooling resources
are no longer acceptable, and smart companies are looking to consolidation and
virtualization to trim expenses and increase operating efficiency.

Next-generation Sun servers, based on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series,
allow IT organizations to meet these challenges by delivering game-changing
performance and virtualization improvements that help enable companies
to leverage best practices for IT management, application deployment, work
processes, and cost control.

Introduction This is especially true for the IT organization. When a

“Best practices” is a popular buzz phrase in today’s
business world. From equipment purchases to data
center management to workflow processes, there’s al-
ways a list of steps to perform and factors to consider
in order to increase the likelihood of success.
These lists, though, aren’t always easy to implement in
the real world. The complex processes and inherently
chaotic nature of any busy company make any kind of
organizational structure difficult to impose.
department within a company needs to roll out a new
application, it sends a request to IT, which must pro-
cure and provision a server, allocate network connec-
tions and storage resources, and deploy the solution.
In most companies, this process takes weeks, at least,
from request to fulfillment.
After a few years of such practice, a company’s data
center typically ends up being chock full of servers,
with each one hosting one application for one group.


The company is then left with paying hefty electrical
bills to power each unit and to cool the room, but each
server is only running at about 10 percent capacity,
and sometimes less. In addition, these hardware units
take up valuable space, and in many companies, the
data center becomes overcrowded. The ad-hoc setup
procedures and masses of cabling strung throughout
the room create a mess that is difficult to navigate, let
alone manage.
IT management, in turn, creates another headache.
When patches and updates must be applied, IT ad-
ministrators have to handle this process manually for
each server unit. This tedious task can take days, even
when the updates and patches are routine and don’t
create any conflicts or problems. And as the server
fleet ages, the likelihood of these routine maintenance
tasks going smoothly gets increasingly lower.
As a result, management costs increase exponentially
with every server that is purchased and installed. This
is driving many companies to consolidate and virtual-
ize in order to increase utilization rates, reduce energy
costs, and simplify their IT operations.
It’s clear that maintaining older servers can create
problems in terms of space, facilities and energy
costs, and staff time. On the other hand, next-genera-
tion, high-performance Sun servers powered by the
new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series—help bring
these costs in line and help enable your company to
implement best practices for data center operations.
With unmatched virtualization density and highly
granular power management, Sun servers deliver per-
formance, reliability, and energy efficiency that enable
companies to meet today’s computing challenges and
scale for growth and success in the future.
Benefits of Consolidation
and Virtualization
As previously mentioned, one problem with many
traditional data center set-ups is that the old one-
application/one-server rule is not cost-efficient.
Today’s new high-performance servers, coupled with
virtualization technology, can replace older servers at
a dramatically reduced rate. With virtualization, each
hardware unit can host several virtual servers, each
with its own OS, and access to memory, connectivity,
and processing resources. By cutting the actual hard-
ware by a factor of five, 10, or even more, companies
are realizing tremendous savings in electricity and
cooling costs. In addition, by running five or more
virtual servers on a single hardware unit, companies
are ensuring that the server’s processing and memory
capacity is leveraged more fully, thereby reducing
waste and increasing value.
Management burdens are also simplified, with
server deployment becoming a matter of software
commands, not physical setup. Standard templates
or configurations for application servers can be
applied to multiple instances simultaneously, and
management tasks can be carried out centrally
and applied to all the servers in the department or
company. This can reduce server rollout time from
weeks to hours, and save thousands of dollars with
each deployment.
This is where best practices come in. The central-
ized management and flexibility of virtualized data
centers enable companies to implement and reap
the benefits of best practices for business processes
and IT services. This strategy thus makes the best
use of IT budget and resources and aligning the IT
organization’s operations more closely with business
goals and activities.
For example, virtualized servers running on powerful
hardware are easier to back up and copy than unique
physical units. Where a manually repaired server outage
would have caused, for instance, three hours of down-
time in the past, a server outage in a virtualized setting
could be remedied almost instantly. Most virtualization
management tools enable administrators to automate
failover routines, so the company can issue uptime

> BEST PRACTICES AT A GLANCE guarantees and offer competitive
service level agreements (SLAs).
Practice Benefit
Reduce hardware Lower electricity, With easy deployments comes
count maintenance,
the potential for configuration
facilities costs
management as well. If a certain
Virtualize servers Increased resource department within a company has
utilization, rollout a basic set of server requirements,
speed, flexibility IT can maintain a standard server
template for its needs. Any time a
Apply standard Speed business
templates and processes, lower IT
request comes in, a new instance
configurations overhead and costs can be deployed automatically. This
can shave weeks off testing and
Incorporate Improve disaster production cycles, accelerating
backup and failover preparedness and workflows and enabling the com-
schemes SLA guarantees
pany to speed its time-to-market.
Consolidate Simplify IT environ-
applications ment, lower costs The immediate savings in terms of
reduced electricity costs and man-
agement overhead are augmented
by these softer—but no less compelling—benefits of
enhanced continuity and higher productivity.
Sun Servers and Storage
Knowing that companies will reap important benefits,
including cost savings and easier server and storage
management, Sun Microsystems developed its new
Sun Fire servers and Sun Blade server modules to
fit every business need, from Web and application
service to high-performance computing.
These hardware models, together with Sun’s net-
working and storage technologies and innovative
Solaris OS, are part of the company’s Open Network
Systems (ONS) initiative. The goal of Open Network
Systems is to deliver products that support advanced
business operations today and well into the future.
It focuses on innovating and leveraging the conver-
gence of open standards for computing, storage,
networking, and software. The resulting systems
deliver superior speed, simplicity, scalability, and
savings when compared with previous generations of
data center equipment.
With ONS, all Sun products offer the widest possible
range of interactivity and compatibility—supporting
Windows*, Linux*, Solaris, and many other operating
systems, and ensuring that your solution integrates
seamlessly into the existing infrastructure.
In addition, to reduce latency and increase applica-
tion performance and read/write speeds, Sun servers
offer solid-state drives and flash memory in addition
to traditional hard disks. These not only read and write
data more quickly than spinning disks, but they also
improve reliability and uptime by eliminating moving
parts from the memory system.
The new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series that powers
Sun systems includes a host of performance improve-
ments and energy consumption controls. The Intel
Xeon processor 5500 series applies power and clock
speeds as dictated by the workload, increasing rates
for heavy loads and throttling back when idling or run-
ning less-demanding applications.
This intelligent power control is enabled by default,
and administrators can customize its settings—us-
ing helpful monitoring and management tools built
into the Solaris OS—to best meet their IT needs and
ensure the optimal balance of power consumption and
performance. Automating these controls also helps
simplify the IT environment, and frees IT staffers to
work on more business-oriented tasks.
The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series also supports
single-thread or multi-thread processing for the
most demanding and dynamic business applications.
Additional performance and horsepower comes from
the Intel QuickPath Interconnect architecture, which
thus enables each processor to access the closest
and most efficient memory resources on the moth-
erboard. All of these speed enhancements add up to
improved productivity, increased customer and user
satisfaction, faster response times for Internet and e-
commerce applications, and room to grow and evolve
as the business does.

All of these improvements pay off in real speed and
efficiency boosts. Based on Intel benchmark tests, the
Intel Xeon processor 5500 series delivers up to 2.25
times the performance at similar platform power as
compared with the Intel Xeon processor 5400 series.
At idle, it draws up to 50 percent less power than the
previous-generation processors.1
Management Ease
Sun servers are also easy to manage and deploy.
Having the flexibility of standards-based and open
protocols enables companies to tailor the system’s
performance to their needs.
Sun’s Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) is included
with the latest Sun server models at no extra charge.
ILOM delivers comprehensive control of Sun systems,
both locally and remotely, thus easing IT burdens by en-
abling centralized management. ILOM also integrates
easily with popular system management tools from
Sun and third-party providers. With ILOM, administra-
tors can monitor systems remotely, check status alerts
and event logs, correct errors, check power and cooling
indicators, respond to security alerts and notifications,
configure networking settings, audit usage logs, control
admin access, and automate routine tasks.
Companies that want to maximize their investment in
Sun servers will find the Solaris OS a powerful asset.
The Solaris OS threading model has years of optimiza-
tion behind it, and it leverages the increased process-
ing power and multi-thread capabilities of the Intel
Xeon processor 5500 series without any need for cus-
tomization or code changes. In addition to high perfor-
mance, the Solaris OS is able to take advantage of the
added energy efficiency and reliability of the Intel Xeon
processor 5500 series. The Solaris OS Predictive Self
Healing is a feature that helps diagnose, isolate, and
recover from hardware and application faults.
Integrating Storage
Another key factor when planning and deploying
virtualization in your server environment is the chal-
lenge of designing a storage infrastructure. Special
consideration must be given to architecting and
consolidating your storage infrastructure to support
server-virtualized application workloads for high
availability, maximum performance, and reduced
management complexity.
While there are many options, using Sun’s Network
File System (NFS) protocol is a simple way to architect
and manage your new storage environment, and it
provides the best performance. NFS is integrated with
the VMware ESX* operating system, so you may assign
network-based file systems to virtual machines and
associated Windows applications such as MS/Ex-
change*, Sharepoint*, MS/SQL*, and others. Sun Stor-
age systems can help bring the following additional
benefits to a server-virtualized environment:
• Improved efficiencies with better visibility of virtu-
alized application workload
• Decreased operational burden, simplifying man-
agement and reducing costs
• Simplified thin provisioning of VM files on NFS
• DTrace Analytics for enhanced SLAs by detecting
and removing bottlenecks
• Accelerated VM cache performance with Flash SSDs
• Reduced deployment costs over Fibre Channel
and iSCSI hardware.
Best Performance for Best Practices
Implementing next-generation Sun servers and
storage can help companies to significantly boost
performance and trim costs. For example, one Sun
server based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series
can replace nine old single-core Intel Xeon proces-
sor-based servers, or three servers based on the Intel
Xeon processor 5100 series.2 This reduction in hard-

1 Source: Intel internal measurements using SPECjbb2005* as of Aug 2007. System configurations: 2S, 80W processors, 8 DIMMs, 1 HDD, 1 PSU.
Except Irwindale=110W processors; Power measurements using SPECjbb2005. Tylersburg-EP from Intel internal measurements as of Sept
2008 with 2.93GHz 95W processors. This information is preliminary and subject to change before launch.
2 Source: Intel estimates as of Nov 2008. Performance comparison using SPECjbb2005 bops (business operations per second). Results have been
estimated based on internal Intel analysis and are provided for informational purposes only. Any difference in system hardware or software
design or configuration may affect actual performance.


ware footprint cuts management expenses, licensing
fees for server operating systems, and energy costs.
Companies thus can deploy these servers strategically
to consolidate existing workloads and position the
business for growth.
In some cases, companies are consolidating rack
space by 50-75 percent, slashing energy costs by 60
percent, and paying half the price of other, similarly
configured offerings.3
Surprisingly, the lower cost does not come with lower
expectations. Sun’s servers have earned top honors
on dozens of benchmark comparisons, outperform-
ing competing systems on benchmark tests such as
VMware’s VMMark and SPEC’s SPECjbb.4
In terms of best practices for deploying a virtual-
ization solution, companies in the planning stage
should, first and foremost, perform a thorough
inventory of existing hardware and software, fol-
lowed by a load analysis to determine exactly how
much processing power and bandwidth each ap-
plication needs.
At this planning stage, ROI calculators such as the
Sun & Intel x86 Server Refresh Savings Estimator5
can provide basic outlines or detailed reports of how
many physical servers can be eliminated and how
much energy can be saved, based on the number and
age of your existing server fleet.
In sum, Sun servers and blades can help enable
companies to implement industry best practices
for cost-control and business success, includ-
ing better resource utilization, instant failover,
continuity and recovery, uptime guarantees, and
process improvements.
3 See customer testimonials at http://www.sun.com/customers
4 Additional product information and specifications are available at: www.sun.com/intel
5. https://roianalyst.alinean.com/sunandintel/launch.html
Why Sun and Intel?
Leveraging the expertise and cutting-edge technol-
ogy advances from leading vendors Intel and Sun is a
smart choice for today’s companies.
Over the years, Intel has made steady gains in energy-
efficient performance and innovative design. Intel is the
world leader in silicon processor technology innovation,
and the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series takes intel-
ligent power and performance to new levels. Sun Micro-
systems worked closely with Intel to engineer a family
of servers that leverage Intel expertise to meet mid-size
and enterprise workload needs reliably and efficiently.
Sun’s servers reflect decades of expertise in designing
innovative network computing infrastructure solutions.
Sun creates products and services that address the
complex needs of today’s companies, and it partners
with market leaders to provide value and choice for
its customers. Its comprehensive family of solutions
includes hardware systems and software such as the
Solaris OS, Java, and MySQL, all of which integrate
seamlessly to deliver powerful business computing.
Aside from its world-class hardware and software,
Sun Microsystems’ service and support offerings are
among the best in the industry. In 2008, the Service
and Support Professionals Association honored Sun
and awarded it with the following distinctions:
• Best Value-added Support
• Best On-site Service
• Best Service Delivery Optimization
• Hall of Fame Award: Lifetime Achievement Award
for Outstanding Service.
These accolades are a good indication that Sun is
committed to making its products work optimally for
your business.

Conclusion
Companies faced with poor resource utilization and
high power/cooling costs need to take better control
of their data center operations. Ask yourself: How
old are your servers? How many applications run
on each? How much are you spending on electricity,
and how much of that money and power is wasted?
Investing in solutions from Sun and Intel will cut
these costs and bring IT into closer alignment with
business needs and goals.
With powerful Sun servers in the data center, compa-
nies enjoy top application performance and granular
energy management, helping them to implement best
practices around IT processes, service level guaran-
tees, backup and recovery, and cost control. <

To learn more about Sun Microsystems’ latest server offerings,

visit http://www.sun.com/intel.

You can also find more educational content designed to help drive your server strategy
forward at the Sun/Intel Server Strategy Resource Center.6

6 http://www.webbuyersguide.com/landingzone/sun-intel/default.aspx.

Copyright © 2009, Intel Corporation and Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Intel, Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.
Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, Sun Blade, Sun Fire, all trademarks and logos that contain Sun, Solaris, or Java, and certain other
trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other
countries.
*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
Performance tests and ratings are measured using specific computer systems and/or components and reflect the approximate performance of
Intel products as measured by those tests. Any difference in system hardware or software design or configuration may affect actual performance.
Buyers should consult other sources of information to evaluate the performance of systems or components they are considering purchasing.
Results have been estimated based on internal Intel analysis and are provided for informational purposes only. Any difference in system hardware
or software design or configuration may affect actual performance.
Intel does not control or audit the design or implementation of third-party benchmark data or Web sites referenced in this document. Intel encour-
ages all of its customers to visit the referenced Web sites or others where similar performance benchmark data are reported and confirm whether
the referenced benchmark data are accurate and reflect performance of systems available for purchase