Sun Fire Servers Power Web 2.0 Companies

WebKnowHow
Friday, June 30, 2006; 03:49 AM

Sun Microsystems announced new customer adoption of its Sun Fire server family with CoolThreads technology. DigiTar, Joyent and Fotolog represent a new crop of Web 2.0 customers that have recently moved to the UltraSPARC T1 processor-based Sun Fire server line running the Solaris 10 Operating System(OS), to both support their growing online operations and to lower power, cooling and space costs in their datacenters.

Sun Fire T2000 server. Source: sun.com

DigiTar, a global leader in Web 2.0 and advanced messaging services, received a Sun Fire T2000 server as part of the Sun Try and Buy program. After testing the CoolThreads technology with the Solaris 10 OS in their datacenter, the company found better transactional throughput numbers and much lower energy consumption levels than their current Intel x86-based servers and made the decision to move away from their HP servers to Sun's CoolThreads systems. DigiTar is using the new servers to deliver powerful "in-the-cloud cyber security services and unparalleled message processing which cost-effectively offloads security and message management burdens from clients. Enterprises, ISPs, SMBs and education clients benefit significantly from DigiTar’s proprietary/High Availability technology, targeted at a rapidly evolving eMessaging/voice/data security markets. DigiTar assures an integrated 24x7 turn-key solution for security/management of critical message Data.

"Scaling open source databases to our exacting levels of performance and reliability is always challenging, said Dale Williams, CEO, Boise, Idaho-based DigiTar, Inc. "Our T2000s have liberated us by reducing 75% of the complexity normally required for our high-availability database clusters. The UltraSPARC T1 has completely overturned the way we plan services and scalability.

Taking Web-based team collaboration to a new level, San Francisco Bay Area-based Joyent also tested the CoolThreads servers as part of the Sun Try and Buy program. Providing customers software that enables teams to share emails, calendars, content and shared applications over the Web, the company needed a way to support growth, scale the business and save on rising energy costs. The CoolThreads systems demonstrated superior performance and energy efficiency, prompting Joyent to begin the move away from their Intel x86 servers from Dell to Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems running the Solaris 10 OS.

"Joyent's platform of Ruby on Rails applications (http://www.joyent.com, http://www.strongspace.com), development tools (http://www.textdrive.com) and unique collaboration offerings run at a greater throughput and lower operational costs on Sun's CoolThreads servers running OpenSolaris. This allows us to give our community of users and developers access to a great platform at a low price, and offers our Web 2.0 developers a powerful environment where they can scale their applications, said David Young, CTO, Joyent.

One of the world's largest photo blogging community, Fotolog looked to long-time partner Sun to help support a three times explosion inWeb traffic in less than a year. The Sun sales representative suggested they evaluate Sun's CoolThreads servers to help alleviate growing pains. The highly-threaded systems helped get the company back online and facilitated a four times increase in Web traffic, three times increase in response timeand much less power consumption than their existing machines. The company has since deployed more Sun Fire T1000 servers to support the millions of users sharing photo blogs on the Internet.

Sun announced the "Try and Buy" program last December that let the world experience the benefits of CoolThreads technology free, for 60 days. This program has been expanded to include Sun Fire x64 servers running AMD Opteron processors, workstations and Sun's StorageTek NAS. Customers can apply online for a "Try and Buy" system at: www.sun.com/tryandbuy