To support its larger, critical business applications, Argonne upgraded to Oracle’s Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 Server, a powerful midrange server that is optimized for 24/7 mission-critical computing and large shared-memory applications.


“We’ve been impressed by SPARC technology for a long time. It’s amazingly engineered to be very powerful, but also very compact and energy efficient,” Salbego said.


Argonne runs Oracle Database on its three Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers, an environment that supports all of its critical enterprise resource planning applications, such as human resources, legal, procurement, and financial applications.


“We run the heart and soul of our business applications on Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers with Oracle Solaris 10, so we need a system that we can count on day-after-day and year-afteryear. We have not had a single operating system or hardware failure since we installed the M4000s in 2007,” Salbego said.


Minimize Infrastructure Footprint and Power Use For smaller to midsize applications,


Winter 2010


Argonne upgraded to Oracle’s Sun Fire X4200 and X4600 M2 servers.


“These servers are well engineered, well built, and provide high levels of performance and reliability,” Salbego said. “We use them on a variety of applications — from Web infrastructure to database systems.” Equally important is the smaller footprint of the new infrastructure.


“We have limited space and limited power. Oracle’s Sun, energyefficient hardware works well for what we’re doing,” Salbego said.


Argonne also opted to standardize on Oracle Solaris 10 operating system and Ubuntu Linux for its primary operating systems.


“Oracle Solaris 10 is reliable and predictable — and has what we need in an operating system,” Salbego said.


With the Oracle Solaris Containers virtualization feature in Oracle Solaris 10, Argonne can consolidate multiple applications onto a single system,


which makes it an ideal solution for standardization. Virtualization ensures high availability, which is critical to Argonne’s environment.


Argonne has continued to expand its virtualized environment, purchasing Oracle’s Sun Storage 7410 as the storage foundation for its virtualized environment. Argonne deployed two Sun 7410 clusters with 80 terabytes of storage between them.


“It performs really well at a low cost,” Salbego said. “In a virtualized environment, you need network-based shared storage that is expandable and reliable. Storage and performance are key, and we get both and more out-of-the-box with Sun Storage 7410, including a fantastic user interface and sophisticated performance enhancement tools.


As important, the system is compact but hugely expandable, and we can easily manage it with out-of-thebox metrics that let us know early when we need to expand.”


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