Consolidating the Sun Store onto Sun Fire T2000 Servers 
by Casey Costley, Srinivasa Bodicharla, Brad Coates, Yunas Nadiadi, and Ragu Venkatesan
October, 2007
Many data centers today are at or near capacity in terms of space, power, and cooling, even as they are compelled to provide secure and available services that will scale into the future. Faced with real hard limits on real estate, power, and thermal capacity, data center managers are increasingly changing the ways they evaluate infrastructure. Performance in particular must be viewed in an envelope of space, power, and dissipated heat--with performance per watt, performance per square foot, and performance per rack unit of paramount importance.
Sun faces these same demands and constraints in its own Information Technology (IT) and is actively seeking effective solutions. In particular, Sun is deploying architectures and strategies to consolidate its own mission-critical SunStore application, using commercially available technology to run Sun-on-Sun. Based on the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology, the new Sun Fire T2000 server offers an effective consolidation platform for these efforts, complemented by the flexibility of Solaris Containers partitioning technology from the Solaris 10 Operating System.
Providing a unique insight into Sun's own operations and adoption of new products and technologies, this article discusses the existing SunStore architecture and describes a timely real-world consolidation effort. In addition to architecture and configuration information, an analysis of anticipated savings in power, cooling, and space is also provided.
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