Sun and the Evolving Datacenter Model

Organizations today are reaching beyond the traditional glass house boundaries to interact directly with customers, partners, suppliers, and employees. In this new extended enterprise model, organizations seek to provide universal access to information and services through business portals on the World Wide Web. This shift, born out of the pressure of global competition in a networked world, places new availability, manageability, and performance requirements on a datacenter. Today’s IT priorities include improving business processes, improving customer data quality, developing better customer relationship management, implementing high availability networks, boosting networking bandwidth, and building e-commerce infrastructures.

In this evolving business paradigm, new data is generated at exponential rates and plays a more vital and publicly visible role than ever before. Consequently, organizations must place a high priority on safeguarding mission-critical data and ensure it remains continuously available. A reliable, flexible, and highly scalable network-based backup and restore solution is an essential part of this endeavor.

Sun Microsystems, Inc., supports the new business model with enterprise servers, storage products, networking hardware, and related software and services, including leading backup and restore solutions. For up-to-date information on Sun™ datacenter initiatives, see

http://www.sun.com/datacenter.

For information on services available from Sun, including professional consulting services, see

http://www.sun.com/service.

Sun offers a line of enterprise servers, from the Sun Enterprise Ultra™ 5S up to the mainframe-class Sun Enterprise™ 10000, also known as the Starfire™ server. At the time of this writing, Sun has shipped well over 1000 Starfire servers, which are now operating in 46 countries worldwide. Many datacenters are powered entirely by Sun Enterprise servers, similar to those shown in FIGURE 1-1.

High availability is a major component of Sun datacenter initiatives. SunUP is a collaborative program between Sun, customers, and third parties to analyze, develop, implement and manage services, infrastructure, and products that improve availability. For additional information, see

http://www.sun.com/availability

Genesys is the Sun code name for the platform architecture of datacenter dot com, the new datacenter model. Genesys is also a program, consisting of products and services, aimed at helping IT organizations move their datacenters into the dot com era. For additional information about Genesys, see

http://www.sun.com/datacenter/genesys.html

Sun has received the attention and enthusiasm of today’s software developers. Many of the new Internet-enabled applications are written for the Solaris Operating Environment and optimized for Sun systems. Sun is the platform of choice for enterprise resource planning (ERP), electronic commerce, and database/data warehousing applications, as well as server consolidation initiatives.

The Sun-Netscape Alliance, known as iPlanet (http://www.iplanet.com), also supports the portal computing model with software and services—as well as content and audience reach through the AOL/Netscape end of the alliance. The Sun-Netscape Alliance offers a full range of software products, including the NetDynamics™ application server, the highest-performance application server on the market.

To support the new datacenter model, large organizations must employ a backup and restore solution that can scale massively in a widely distributed environment. To help customers meet this demand, Sun offers OEM versions of the two most popular and powerful enterprise backup and restore tools on the market: VERITAS NetBackup as Sun StorEdge Enterprise NetBackUp™, and Legato Networker™ as Solstice Backup™.

There are many other backup and restore products on the market, but these two are among the most scalable and robust products available. Choosing a backup and restore tool is one of the most important decisions an IT manager must make. For guidance on this issue, see “Backup Tool Selection Criteria” on page 6.

Modern developments in backup technology require significant processing power and I/O bandwidth. Sun Enterprise servers provide scalable symmetric multiprocessing, from 1 to 64 high-performance UltraSPARC™-II processors, with up to 64 Gbytes of memory and up to 20 Tbytes of disk storage. The advent of scalable I/O platforms such as these enables a database to be configured for the optimal balance of processing power and I/O bandwidth, so online backups can proceed with minimal impact on database performance.

The NetBackup GUI, shown in FIGURE 1-2, supports centralized administration of a backup and restore architecture that may include widely distributed nodes located throughout a global enterprise.