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Maties fires up Oracle on Sun

One of South Africa's foremost institutions of higher education has selected Sun Microsystems hardware, supplied by Breakpoint Solutions, to support the University's Oracle Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) implementation.

Stellenbosch University has implemented two Sun Fire V880 servers, three Sun Fire V480 application servers, and two Sun StorEDGE 3510FC fibre-channel Storage Area Network (SAN) devices.

According to Johann Kistner, Director of Administrative information systems at IT, the University needed performance hardware in order to drive the Oracle system. After a sizing analysis was completed by Breakpoint, the Sun hardware solution was selected, as it was capable of delivering the necessary throughput at a justifiable cost.

Stressing the importance of planning for an enterprise project of this magnitude, Robert Upton, technical specialist at Breakpoint Solutions, explained that the company played a key role in ensuring that a full sizing exercise for the Oracle applications was conducted. This allowed Breakpoint to specify and select hardware that would support the current and future requirements of the client. "The exercise included close interaction with the Sun Oracle Testing Application Centre (SOATC), which is a joint Sun and Oracle establishment that concentrates on ensuring maximum performance for Oracle on Solaris, while providing accurate hardware sizing models," he says.

While the results of the sizing exercise were a major contributing factor in the hardware decision, Stellenbosch existing investment in Sun hardware played a significant role in their decision regarding the specific Sun servers that were purchased. The University already had three V880's in its technology infrastructure and had a positive experience with Sun's support network of partners and distributors. Robert Upton, technical specialist at Breakpoint Solutions explains, "This gives the benefit of allowing components such as the CPU, or memory board to be interchanged, while protecting the existing investment".

The SunFire V880 and V480 have high density memory configurations, a maximum of 8 and 4 CPU's respectively, and fibre channel internal disks. Their CPU/Memory boards are also interchangeable.

According to Upton, the choice of the StorEDGE SAN was driven by performance and price. "The Sun StorEDGE 3510FC SAN is an affordable, enterprise class, fibre channel storage product at workgroup pricing. It is highly redundant with dual RAID controllers and includes an onboard fibre-channel switch, reducing the need for costly external switches," he says.

Kistner explained that the University runs its business systems in real time and in addition, staff have access to a selection of self-service functions. Performance is critical to sustain the business and maintain productivity.  In addition, Sun Sparc hardware and the Solaris operating system are a stable, proven and affordable combination that is widely supported by software vendors. Solaris is the primary choice of two of the enterprise applications used by the University. The Sparc processors provide a high performance per CPU, which is an important factor particularly with software which is licensed per CPU.

The University has standardised on Sun hardware for most of its administrative systems, which has led to support cost savings and will lead to further savings as the system's management is consolidated into a single console.

The University also intends to run its WebCT distance learning software on Sun; the pilot project will be implemented on two V240's, one as the database server and the other as the application server.

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