Norris' team has also been working through a consolidation of Santos' Windows server environment with the VMware virtualization software.

"Santos has about 130 physical [x86] servers and 30 Unix servers, including Sun 6800 servers," Norris said. "We are progressively replacing older [physical] servers with virtual servers on other machines that have capacity and useful life left."

Norris said Santos cannot virtualize its Solaris systems as they are a mix of versions 8 and 9 of the operating system.

"The view is to upgrade the Oracle databases and ERP in April next year," he said, adding this may be to Solaris 10, which supports virtualized "containers".

"I think the view is that the approach to containers is not quite sorted out yet. They might be OK for test and development, but not for production."