Scott Myers, senior systems administrator, I T Operations Group, at Tucson Electric Power Company, says that Oracle has exceeded his expectations in terms of the
SPARC roadmap. “The SPARC T4 is really an incredible chip in performance, expandability, and capabilities,” he says.
Solaris 10 inside Oracle Solaris Zones,” says Scott Myers, senior
systems administrator, I T Operations Group, at TEP.
Myers likes the zone approach because it doesn’t come with a
performance hit. In fact, Myers notes that even if an application
is going to take up the full capacity of a SPARC Enterprise M5000
server, he still puts it into Oracle Solaris Zones to make it portable.
It makes upgrades easier, provides greater flexibility, and reduces
potential downtime.
“We create Oracle Solaris Zones that keep systems isolated,”
says Myers. “Oracle Solaris Zones allow us to consolidate more oper-
ations on a single server, cut costs, simplify
maintenance, save space, and reduce
power consumption.”
With Oracle Solaris Zones, TEP is
protected against risks such as system
outages. “If we have a system outage or
need to upgrade the hardware, we can
migrate a zone to another host with just a
couple minutes of downtime,” says Myers.
“It provides us with added flexibility and
greater portability.”
PHIL SALTONSTALL
Management is also simpler.
“Consolidating our systems has really cut
down on the management overhead com-
pared to having everything on a separate
physical server, because we can do global zone patches with Oracle
Solaris,” says Myers. “When we patch a server, the patch rolls up
to everything on the server, so we have fewer systems to patch and
manage. It’s definitely easier.”
Oracle Solaris Zones capabilities have also enabled Myers and
his IT colleagues to address new business requirements faster and
more efficiently.
Unisource Energy Corporation (UNS)
uns.com
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Industry: Utilities
Employees: 2,000
Oracle products: Oracle E-Business Suite,
Oracle Database, PeopleSoft applications,
Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing
solutions, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle
Hyperion solutions, Oracle WebLogic Server,
Oracle Solaris 10, SPARC Enterprise M5000
and Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 servers, Sun
ZFS Storage Appliance
SNAPSHOT
FOLLOWING SPARC
An important part of TEP’s commitment to
Oracle Solaris and SPARC-based servers has
been Oracle’s own commitment to SPARC,
including the future SPARC roadmap and
continued upgrade path. TEP is currently
beta-testing the new SPARC T4–based
servers and is impressed with the results.
“The SPARC T4 is really an incredible chip
in performance, expandability, and capabilities,” says Myers. “We’ve been testing it with
Oracle E-Business Suite, running a nightly
