INDUSTRY

With Solaris 10 Containers UGS Effectively Manages Consolidation of Sun SPARC and AMD Opteron Processor-Based Sun Fire Servers -- Sun Microsystems announced that UGS Corp., a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, chose Sun to consolidate its servers in a virtualized environment to increase efficiency and flexibility, and reduce operational costs. UGS is leveraging the unique Solaris Containers inherent in the Sun Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) as a key component of its IT virtualization strategy. Utilizing Sun Fire V440 servers with SPARC processors and "Galaxy" Sun Fire X4200 servers powered by AMD Opteron processors, UGS has created a grid that allows the company to easily deploy, isolate and move applications in order to optimally prepare and respond to business cycle-induced surges in demand. "By adding Solaris 10 Containers to our Unix environments, we have created a reliable, powerful and cost effective platform for our applications. This provides us exceptional flexibility in load-balancing that has increased our server utilization by 25 percent," said Nick Ritter, manager of System Engineering, UGS. "Solaris' open nature allows us to maximize the operating system, regardless of the underlying hardware." Running mySAP CRM, SAP ERP Core Component and SAP Enterprise Portal, UGS' data center required flexibility and high performance to meet peak usage times such as at the end of each month, quarter and year. After implementing the new Sun solution in less than 90 days, Sun's innovations--particularly the Solaris Containers, Sun's Solaris 10 OS virtual partitioning technology--surpassed UGS' expectations. "The ability to provide a nearly unlimited number of OS instances on any server running Solaris 10 OS means that Sun customers can safely and securely consolidate thousands of applications on to a single system," said Chris Ratcliffe, director, Solaris Marketing, Sun Microsystems. "With over 57 performance world records on SPARC and AMD Opteron processor-based servers to its credit, Solaris 10 OS is providing customers like UGS with the ability to deliver unmatched performance and flexibility in their data centers without the need to purchase specialized hardware or applications."