Sun Microsystems announced that it will demonstrate virtualization solutions, resulting from its technical collaboration with SAP AG, at SAP Virtualization Week 2009, being held April 20-24 at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, CA. In addition, Sun is announcing expanded support for the Adaptive Computing Controller tool from SAP via the Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System and Sun Logical Domains (LDoms) software. Sun has also joined SAP as a founding member of the “Green IT” community. For more information on Sun virtualization solutions in support of SAP applications, visit: http://www.sun.com/sap/virtualization.

“For more than 10 years, Sun and SAP have been delivering virtualization solutions to our joint customers across the globe,” said Jim McHugh, vice president of Data Center Software Marketing at Sun. Sun offers a complete desktop-to-datacenter virtualization product portfolio to help companies more efficiently deploy SAP solutions, simplify IT infrastructures and leverage computing resources more effectively.”

Sun also announced its participation as a founding member of the Green IT community. The Green IT community will work together to generate a shared map of solutions and services for Green IT and identify opportunities for co-innovation, co-development and standardization.

Solaris Containers and Solaris ZFS Tested for Compliance With Adaptive Computing Controller Tool
The Solaris 10 OS, featuring Solaris Containers and the Solaris ZFS(TM) file system, runs across multiple platforms, enabling customers to configure and virtualize SAP solutions. Sun has worked closely with SAP to test the compliance of specifically designed solutions with the Adaptive Computing Controller tool. The Solaris OS used together with the Adaptive Computing Controller tool provides a central point of control for customers to configure their computing resources to run any service on any server at any time. In addition, Sun is continuing to work with SAP to integrate and test additional virtualization technologies with SAP solutions, such as enabling Sun xVM Ops Center to create, start, stop, and move instances of SAP applications across groups of servers.

Operating system virtualization can help companies to reduce costs through sever consolidation and maximum usage of resources. Solaris Containers allows integrated virtualization with low overhead, at no cost. Solaris Containers can support thousands of applications on a single server, which helps reduce server footprint, simplify system management and reduce costs. The Adaptive Computing Controller tool can be used in combination with Solaris Containers to provide a single source of control to operate, observe, manage, and provision SAP applications in a container environment.

Solaris ZFS provides unparalleled data integrity, capability, performance and management. Used with Solaris Containers, the ZFS file system provides a low-cost, flexible solution for fast, easy data recovery. In addition, storage virtualization powered by the ZFS file system helps to centralize and pool storage into a single resource, streamlines the entire storage environment and applies the most cost-effective resources for each task.

LDoms Support for SAP Business Applications
The latest update to Sun LDoms software features advanced capabilities to help customers drive greater data center efficiency, including both Dynamic Domain Mobility, as well as advance network and storage I/O features to help applications be more resilient to hardware outages and provide customers the flexibility to modify their systems resources to address their changing business requirements. With integration for the Adaptive Computing Controller tool, customers can quickly and easily move existing physical environments to virtual containers on Solaris 10 and leverage LDoms software to take advantage of the performance, scale and cost savings of new CMT-based servers.

Sun Participates In SAP Virtualization Week 2009
As part of SAP Virtualization Week 2009, on Tuesday, April 21st, Sun's Virtualization CTO, Tim Marsland, will participate in a panel discussion, along with Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management at Citrix; Mike Neil, GM Virtualization at Microsoft; Steve Herrod, CTO at VMware; and Alex Vasilevsky, CTO, Virtual Computer, hosted by "The Churchill Club" http://churchillclub.org/eventDetail.jsp?EVT_ID=812.

Sun will also be demonstrating some of its virtualization technologies, including xVM Ops Center and Sun VirtualBox(TM), as well as participating in two breakout sessions at SAP Virtualization Week: “Serving 82,000 students efficiently with the use of Sun Virtualization Technologies,” delivered by the Technical University of Munich at 9 a.m. on April 21st and “Sun and SAP Expand your Virtualization Choices” at 3 p.m. on April 22nd.

Brown-Forman and The Technical University of Munich Leverage Sun Virtualization Solutions
Sun offers a complete desktop-to-datacenter virtualization product portfolio in support of SAP applications and a comprehensive set of virtualization solutions to help customers deploy new services faster, maximize the utilization of system resources and more easily monitor and manage virtualized environments. For more details, visit: http://www.sun.com/sap/virtualization.

Brown-Forman
Based in Louisville, Kentucky, Brown-Forman Corporation is one of the largest American-owned spirits and wine companies and is among the ten largest global spirits companies. Brown-Forman brands include Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey, Fetzer California Wines, Southern Comfort and Finlandia Vodka. Brown-Forman has adopted a virtualization strategy to run its SAP CRM application based on Solaris 10 OS, Solaris Containers and Solaris ZFS, running on Sun Fire V490 and Sun SPARC(R) Enterprise T2000 servers.

“In our opinion, the Solaris Operating System performs in a stellar fashion for 'heavy lift' applications. From a TCO standpoint, it was a bit of a no-brainer for us to choose Solaris Containers. We plan to use virtualization to push consolidation to the limit and decrease our datacenter footprint by 50 percent,” said Mitch Zebrun, lead engineer, SAP Enterprise Software Administration, Brown-Forman Corporation. “The flexibility of Solaris Containers also allows us to create containers for on-the-fly sandbox space, providing a safe environment for experimenting and testing new SAP applications, reducing the risk associated with implementing system changes and upgrades.”

Technical University of Munich
A joint effort between Sun Microsystems, SAP AG, and the Technical University of Munich (Technische Universtät München, TUM) is the SAP University Competency Center (SAP UCC), which operates over 100 SAP applications on 70 Sun servers, serving as many as 120 universities and 82,000 users. The SAP UCC has achieved greater flexibility in its application environment by using Sun hardware and virtualization technologies such as Solaris Containers and LDoms. As a result, the SAP UCC has also greatly reduced its physical hardware and power consumption while still maintaining stable, responsive systems that deliver excellent performance during heavy workloads.

“After an operating period of two years, we can confirm that virtualization goes hand in hand with consolidation. We need less physical hardware and less energy than before, and we continue to use an environment with stable response times and good performance,” said Professor Helmut Krcmar, academic director SAP University Competence Center EMEA and Chair for Information Systems, Technische Universtät München. “Using Sun technologies such as Solaris 10 Containers and LDoms have helped us achieve optimal utilization.”