Gull04 - that looks nice setup. For this setup, DB guys don't want to go away from Sparc. But during discussion with my manager, I suggested if can make another environment of RHEV, which can host application VMs. Currently we have large VMWare setup. Management's main focus will still remain on cost of ownership (in comparison to VMWare, which is pretty expensive), if they would allow to keep some components on RHEV
Peasant - We have zones also, but to keep it more robust and fault tolerant, LDOM was setup long back. In comparison to zones, LDOM administration is complex, if we want to add/remove/edit any resource. Local redundancy (all in Seattle) are having LUNs shared among servers. Geo Redundancy (Seattle and Phoenix) are having redundancy on DB level only. For DR site also, replication is setup on DB level only.