CFOs have shifted their focus from simply providing services to aligning IT strategy with business needs — while cutting costs and maintaining security. Will the Solaris 10 OS provide the necessary paradigm shift in efficiencies?

IT organizations want to be more responsive and efficient. They can no longer afford a data center model that requires dedicated servers to address specific applications, testing, development, staging, training, and production.

Historical investments of this nature have led to server sprawl and utilization rates that frequently fall below 15 percent. Since no two organizations have the same type of workload (and workloads shift dynamically) or use system resources in the same way, the problem of provisioning resources on a shared system can be tricky.

Server consolidation should obviously reduce total capital investment costs, lower system management expenses, and decrease software and hardware maintenance fees by minimizing the total number of systems required. Unfortunately, these efficiencies haven't been fully realized due to a gap between conceptualization and actualization.