at the operating system level, lock down
processes, and lock down access controls
and journaling with syslogging. When the
company upgraded from Oracle Solaris 8 to
Oracle Solaris 10, Moretto recalls, Oracle’s
application binary compatibility guarantee
worked as advertised and the company had
no issues with the operating system (see the
sidebar “Oracle Solaris Binary Application
Guarantee Program”).
Next, Moretto started evaluating the
servers. “We were looking at either the
SMP [symmetric multiprocessing] model,
with a single monolithic production type
server, or an Oracle Real Application Clusters
(Oracle RAC) infrastructure,” says Moretto.
“The Oracle RAC enhancements between
Oracle9i Database and Oracle Database 10g
were immense, and after we upgraded to
Oracle 10g, it was an ideal fit. At that point,
we decided our best option would be to
configure from that single large server type
model to an Oracle RAC cluster.”
The solution Moretto and his team
implemented uses Oracle Database 10g
with Oracle Application Server 10g and
Oracle WebLogic Server. This integrated
platform supports SunGard’s Oracle E-Business Suite environment
along with some of the company’s critical in-house developed
systems. It runs on a four-node Oracle RAC configuration based
on four of Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers running
Oracle Solaris 10, and it utilizes Oracle’s Sun SPARC Enterprise
T5440, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220, and Sun SPARC Enterprise
T2000 servers, all running Oracle Solaris 10, for its applications
and Web services.
SunGard is also taking full advantage of the virtualization capabilities in Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle Solaris Containers.
The company’s Oracle E-Business Suite
environment uses two physical Sun SPARC
Enterprise T5220s with a load balancer in
front, giving SunGard the ability to have sessions going to individual logical domains
or to individual virtual servers on those two
physical SPARC systems.
“When we went live, I could not have
been happier with how well the equipment
performed,” Moretto says. “We’ve been
up and running in an Oracle RAC environ-
ment for about a year and a half now, with
no complaints.”
SunGard’s New Jersey datacenter, which
is dedicated to colocation and managed
CATHERINE GIBBONS
Downtime is not an option for SunGard. The company depends on a combination of Oracle Real Application
Clusters, SPARC Enterprise servers, and Oracle Solaris 10, says Hal Moretto, director of database platforms.
years, SunGard had accumulated a variety of classes of servers.
“The configurations of these systems were so drastically different,
it made our performance and QA testing a challenge,” he explains.
So Moretto began a multiyear plan to enhance SunGard’s infrastructure, addressing the storage, operating system, physical servers,
database, and applications in use. He wanted a leading-edge platform that he could rely on to scale both internally and externally as
additional servers were added to support SunGard’s current and
future needs.
With Oracle Solaris, SunGard was able to harden its servers
SPARC in the Cloud
According to Jean S. Bozman, research vice president at International Data Corporation (IDC),
the industry is moving “to the next level of cloud
and virtualization technologies,” where UNIX
platforms such as Oracle Solaris–based SPARC
systems will rise in prominence.
“You’re going to see UNIX more often in
these scenarios because people are asking their
cloud services to do more,” Bozman says. “Early
cloud deployments were mainly designed to
support remote workers, along with collabo-
ration, e-mail, groupware, and application
development. But as cloud services become
enterprise cloud services, we see more demand
for line-of-business applications, financial
applications, and online databases, and cus-
tomers will need more-powerful and more-
scalable server platforms.“
UNIX servers have been fully virtualized for
many years, and virtualization is a key way to
enable a platform to provide cloud services,
Bozman points out. “As end-user demand
grows, these platforms can service a cascading
wave of requests on an as-needed basis, by pro-
visioning more capacity. And they can do that
with high levels of security and availability—
both of which are top requirements for next-gen
cloud deployments, IDC studies show. That’s
why we expect to see more UNIX servers in
private cloud settings.”
