BANGALORE, INDIA: Internet service provider Iowa Network Services announced that it is using Oracle Solaris operating system on Oracle’s Sparc T-Series servers, to improve services uptime and create virtual servers to help consolidate its data centre and phase out older hardware.

The company claims, in a release, that with Oracle Solaris, it has substantially improved the availability and reliability of its services, achieving close to 99.999 per cent uptime.

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“Oracle Solaris on SPARC servers is a key component of our infrastructure. With Oracle Solaris Containers, we can create multiple private execution environments within a single instance of Oracle Solaris,” said Steve Guntly, Manager, Systems Administration, Iowa Network Services Inc. “We are looking forward to testing Oracle Solaris 11 technologies and features on the SPARC T3-1 server and leveraging the improved software and hardware integration and expanded virtualization capabilities, with hopefully even better performance and reliability.”

Using the built-in virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris Containers, Iowa Network Services initially ran 130 virtual servers housed on 36 physical servers, reducing hardware management needs, equipment costs and space requirements, increasing the flexibility of server resources and providing a 25 per cent performance improvement from consolidation of services.

The Oracle Solaris Legacy Containers capability allows Iowa Network Services to run their Solaris 8 and 9 Oracle Solaris applications within multiple Oracle Solaris environments on a single system, immediately gaining scalability and performance benefits, without modifying existing applications.

Iowa Network Services has consolidated 36 servers on to four Sparc T-series servers, reducing its footprint by more than 85 per cent, the release adds. Iowa is also planning to migrate to Oracle Solaris 11 in the future.