Sun's Solaris 10 Container Concept

The average server in most data centres runs at idling speed or at best 20% of its capacity, yet at the same time consumes about 300 watts of power and takes up valuable floor space. With some farms running hundreds of servers this translates to massive expenditure that can be avoided.

Martin H"aring, marketing director for South and East Europe, Middle East & Africa Sun Microsystems, told customers and channel partners at a Sun Forum held in Durban last week (August 17) that Sun is introducing a new "container" concept based on the Solaris 10 operating system that addresses this issue.

The container concept makes it possible to run up to 8 000 virtual systems on one physical server. Each virtual system is fault isolated from each other, there is no need for additional middleware and the whole system uses the same processor, meaning power consumption is up to 70% less.

"Other software partitioning tools such as VMWare are reducing overall system performance because they are sitting between the Hardware and the Operating System," says H"aring.

Each container is equipped with its own memory and file allocations making the concept ideal for database, application and web servers.

H"aring said that approximately five to seven Xeon servers could be consolidated onto one Niagara System using the container method.

Security had been addressed and he noted that Sun is the only company in the world with the highest levels of security with features such as digital certificates and user and process rights management structures with a granular management approach.

A new feature offered by Solaris 10 is Fault Manager. This includes automated error handling which detects diagnoses and reports and mitigates faults. Components are "off lined" before failure reducing downtime considerably. This feature also reduces complexity and simplifies error reporting. It reduces costs and provides 24 x forever uptime thus increasing utilisation and higher server-to-administrator ratio.

Solaris Service Manager has been introduced to define relationships among applications simplifying administration and consolidating application profiles.

On performance, he said this traditionally involves increasing the clock speed or tuning the application. A new feature called Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) involves 37 000 probes in Solaris that checks on an application's performance in real time, finds faults and debugs. "The OpenSource development community is therefore very excited that DTrace has been included," says H"aring.