“Best practices” is a popular buzz phrase in today’s business world. From equipment purchases to data center management to workflow processes, there’s always a list of steps to perform and factors to consider in order to increase the likelihood of success.

These lists, though, aren’t always easy to implement in the real world. The complex processes and inherently chaotic nature of any busy company make any kind of organizational structure difficult to impose.

This is especially true for the IT organization. When a department within a company needs to roll out a new application, it sends a request to IT, which must procure and provision a server, allocate network connections and storage resources, and deploy the solution.

In most companies, this process takes weeks, at least, from request to fulfillment. After a few years of such practice, a company’s data center typically ends up being chock full of servers, with each one hosting one application for one group.

This paper shows how next-generation Sun servers, based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, allow IT organizations to meet these challenges by delivering game-changing performance and virtualization improvements that help enable companies to leverage best practices for IT management, application deployment, work processes, and cost control.