Reducing the costs of IT infrastructure and improving the manageability and efficiency of web services pose significant challenges for many organizations in today's economic climate. Recent studies from IDC[5] describe the challenges IT managers face administering the proliferation of x86-based servers used to run web services applications. The reports from those studies reveal that using large number of x86-based systems can increase space and power consumption, as well as cost and asset management overhead. In addition, many of these x86-based systems run a mixture of operating system and application software leading to increased management complexity and potential security concerns.

Faced with these challenges, many organizations are attracted by the idea of consolidating web and application services from multiple x86-based servers to a smaller number of high-performance servers. This approach strives to help simplify management, improve performance, and increase the efficiency of delivering web services. The combined capabilities of the Sun Fire™ T1000 server and Solaris™ Containers technology in particular offer significant promise as a web-tier consolidation platform. The Sun Fire T1000 server offers high aggregate throughput performance in a small, power-efficient footprint. Solaris containers provide a complete, isolated, and secure runtime environment for applications, enabling multiple web servers to safely and efficiently run on the same platform.

This paper explores the configuration and testing of the Sun Fire T1000 server as a web-tier consolidation platform. It discusses methodologies used to consolidate multiple web servers onto a single Sun Fire T1000 server, and explains the steps used to configure the Solaris Containers. In addition, to determine the effectiveness of this approach, testing was performed to evaluate the consolidated Sun Fire T1000 system against a baseline configuration of current Xeon servers, a popular choice as web server platform.