What would Rod Serling think about a modern Data Center?

Gotta wonder what good old Rod Serling would think if we resurrected him inside a modern data center. Surrounded by humming racks of Sun servers, he just might start narrating. I can hear him now, intoning ominously as the LEDs blinked all around, “I’m traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of my imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead …”

Rod was great. He (of all people) came to mind when I was reading about Sun Solaris 10 virtualization. The people at Sun kinda asked for it when they decided a virtual environment created under Solaris 10 is a “Solaris Zone.” That’s a name right out of 50s-era, drive-in movie science fiction. Rod would love it!

FWIW, a “Solaris Zone,” as defined by the dudes at Sun, is “A virtual environment that has security and application fault containment, and its own name space that can be tailored to the application that will run in it.”

Put that on your signpost.  It’s right up ahead. 

For more information, please visit www.electronicdatagirl.com

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Solid Savings

I had an uncle who used to confuse me when I was young because he regularly said something or other, like his Buick, was “solid as Sears.”

Why would he come to mind as I looked into all the wonderful aspects of Sun Microsystems’ virtualization efforts? After all, Uncle Jack — may he R.I.P. — wouldn’t know a Solaris Container from a StorageTek tape drive.

 

For some reason, the memory of favorite uncle’s Sears references were stimulated when I read that Sears Canada used Sun virtualization to save $200,000 each year and reduce batch processing time by up to 85 percent.

The value of virtualization doesn’t get much more solid than that, Jack.

For more information, please visit www.electronicdatagirl.com

Virtualization

There sure is a lot of propeller-headed, pocket-protected computer geek language to be digested when you start researching consolidation and virtualization. Ironically, much of it all seems so, um, virtual.

But one case highlighted by Sun Microsystems is pretty convincing that, despite all the seemingly ephemeral talk about containers and partitioning and logical domains, there’s some Real World dollars and cents benefits to it all.

KnowledgeBase Marketing’s decision to use Sun virtualization resulted in cutting the company’s total cost of ownership by 40 percent. It reduced administration time by about 50 percent and it brought an 86 percent cut in transaction costs.

Man, they can throw out the percentages! Here are more: A 70 percent reduction in channel utilization; a 25 percent drop in tape costs; a 200 percent increase in tape capacity and (drum roll please) a 300 percent improvement in 1/0 throughput.

Blinding me with science! For more information, please visit www.electronicdatagirl.com