Business Problems

If you work in a large data center environment, the following questions might be familiar to you.

• The data center is full of systems. Many of those systems are lightly used, and more applications are always waiting to be brought online. There is no room to add more systems, and the available systems are getting more powerful. How can we add a new application to an existing system, without affecting the level of service provided to its users?

• There are so many small server systems that they are a nightmare to manage. Each server has its own custom setup, and unlike an environment containing desktop machines, it's hard to automate a cloned installation process. How can we combine lots of small servers into a few big ones?

• Very large systems are installed in the data center, and many applications share their resources. How can we measure and control these applications to meet a service level agreement (SLA) that we have with users?

• The Solaris operating environment is being installed as a replacement for mainframes running MVS. How can mainframe techniques be applied to a UNIX system? What is the same and what is new?

• Sun provides a base-level operating environment with many facilities and several unbundled products that extend its capability. How can we tell what combinations of products work together to solve our business problems?

These are the questions answered by this book.