Mshubin,

This information should help you. It comes directly from the sources below. One of the biggest success stories of a service I've used is LinkedIn, and they've been on Sun Microsystem servers for some time.

Hopefully this helps, and thanks for asking on Mahalo Answers!

------

Addition of MySQL Open Source Database Strengthens Sun's Industry-Leading Portfolio for Gracenote, LinkedIn and Other Leading Internet Companies

SANTA CLARA, CA March 25, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) today announced that hundreds of new Web 2.0 companies are leveraging Sun's open technologies to scale their growing Internet-based business. Gracenote, LinkedIn, RealTime Matrix, Siteworx and SuccessFactors are among a growing list of companies that leverage the Solaris Operating System, Sun Fire x64 and SPARC processor-based servers and Sun StorageTek storage technologies as the platform for growing IT infrastructures. The recent acquisition of MySQL adds open source database software and makes Sun's portfolio the strongest and most comprehensive in the industry.

The need for additional compute power, longer archive periods and rising power and cooling costs are just some of the issues concurrent across the Web 2.0 landscape. Sun sponsored the first in a series of discussions between end-users and press and analysts in San Francisco to discuss how they are addressing the ever-growing demands for computing power, data storage and open-source software.

"In today's Internet landscape, we're forced to do more with less. Sun's open approach to computing provides us low-cost, high-performance solutions that enable my business to grow and rapidly innovate. There's not an enterprise vendor in the industry that understands my needs better," said James Burgess, founder and chief operating officer at Flexilis.

"The Web 2.0 sector is a very exciting place and one that experiences changes on an almost daily basis. Sun understands this and works hard to offer solutions to companies that will allow companies the flexibility and support that they need to be successful," said Juan Carlos Soto, vice president, global market development and engineering, Sun Microsystems. "We appreciate the difficult decisions behind choosing technology solutions and help ensure we provide the consultancy and expertise that each and every customer gets the right solution for their needs. We are proud to be working with some of the hottest Web properties at the moment and look forward to seeing how they continue to evolve."

Customers Pushing Web 2.0 Envelope with Help of Sun

Flexilis A leading provider of mobile security solutions, Flexilis ensures that personal information and critical data are safe in an environment where new and ever-changing forms of attack that seek to compromise cellular phones and other mobile devices are being developed on an almost daily basis. Deploying a selection of Sun Fire x64 systems to power its innovative Mobile Security services, Flexilis has created an IT infrastructure that is fast, reliable, and scalable allowing it to stay ahead of hackers and other malicious attacks. With the speed and efficiency of the new Sun platform, the company is able to address security threats before they become security problems and give users peace of mind in an increasingly mobile world.

Gracenote
Gracenote powers mobile music services from the world's leading handset manufacturers, including Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. For a generation that wants everything in the palm of their hands, Gracenote provides a service with the ability to search and instantly find the recordings the listeners want to hear and display titles, composers and other relevant information on the devices. To get the reliability and performance needs it requires to run its online business, Gracenote chose a selection of Sun x64 servers with Sun's support services to help ensure that its facilities run smoothly 24/7. Having realized the benefits of deploying the Solaris 10 Operating System and taking advantage of its multithreading capabilities to handle the 2 billion queries it receives on a monthly basis, Gracenote also opted to migrate its non-Sun servers to Solaris to maintain high throughput rates across the board.

"We need fast performance, and when you have hardware in multiple co-location facilities, some of which are remote from your offices, you need to put in equipment that is highly reliable," says Matthew Leeds, Vice President of Operations for Gracenote. "Sun helps us to deliver a scalable, reliable service that lets us sleep at night because we know that we can rely on the stability and performance of our Sun products."

LinkedIn
LinkedIn, the fast-growing online network of more than 20 million professionals in over 150 industries from around the world, operates an IT environment consisting of more than 300 Sun x64 and UltraSPARC-based servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System to support its web-tier and database-tier infrastructure. Several factors were key to LinkedIn's choice of Sun over competing vendors, including Sun's integration and support for the Solaris and Java software platforms; easy availability of open-source tools such as the Sun Studio compilers and Java Virtual Machines for Opteron, SPARC and Mac; Sun cluster software to create a high-availability solution for multiple datacenters; and finally Sun Services support for Solaris scripting, Java escalations, compiler issues and Java native interfaces. Ultimately, Sun's ability to deliver a pre-tested and easy to deploy integrated hardware, software and services solution with outstanding price/performance was decisive for LinkedIn.

Real Time Matrix
Real Time Matrix, a provider of real-time content delivery for the social web, represents a special breed of Web 2.0 company that takes advantage of a broad array of Sun’s technology portfolio including Sun UltraSPARC T1 processors, the Solaris 10 Operating System as well as Sun’s newly acquired MySQL database software. With the demands of delivering live news, blog and video content at a rate of 2 million articles per day, Real Time Matrix relies on Sun Fire T1000 and Sun Fire T2000 servers for its high performance on throughput-intensive applications, while at the same time saving on power and space. The Solaris 10 OS helped RTM increase reliability and throughput from a hundred search matches per second up to 10,000 per second per thread. Real Time Matrix relies upon MySQL on the T2000 for fast, dependable delivery of ads to their social network applications at a rate of 750,000 per day and growing. With Sun Fire, Solaris, and MySQL, Real Time Matrix has the power and dependability they require for representing major Brands online, 24 X 7.

Siteworx
Siteworx is a full-service Web strategy consultancy with deep expertise in user experience, application development and interactive marketing. It was named one of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. by Inc. magazine in 2007. Facing the challenge of expanding rapidly without compromising the quality of service for its prestigious clientele, Siteworx wanted to upgrade its technology and streamline processes in order to control costs at two facilities. After evaluating competition that included Dell, the company invested in Sun Fire x64 servers, citing its fast, reliable and energy efficient benefits as key factors behind this decision. Switching from Red Hat Linux to Solaris 10, the company has maintained 100 percent uptime of its servers, reduced total cost of ownership as a direct result of the virtualization capability Solaris 10 offers, and implemented the Solaris ZFS file system feature dramatically improving disk allocation management and freed up administration time.

SuccessFactors
Revolutionizing the future of work, SuccessFactors delivers on-demand performance and talent management solutions to help companies achieve high-performing workforces. With more than 1,750 customers globally and over 3 million users, SuccessFactors is one of the world’s largest Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. The company chose to deploy Sun's SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers with the Solaris Operating System, due to its price-performance, scalability, and stability. The Sun systems enable SuccessFactors to deliver specialized software services to the company's fast-growing list of clients.

FortiusOne

FortiusOne provides next-generation intelligent mapping solutions that make the exploding world of geographic data widely accessible via the Internet. The company's intelligent mapping Web services require huge amounts of computational power and storage capacity. To meet the needs of its growing business, FortiusOne had to strike a balance between costs and the need for a scalable and high-performance infrastructure. After reviewing alternative options, the company chose Sun's Startup Essentials program enabling them to purchase Sun's highly scalable server and storage technologies at discounted prices.

"We are at the forefront of the next-generation Web, where massive amounts of structured and unstructured data and powerful Web computing technologies are converging," said Sean Gorman, CEO of FortiusOne. "The technological breakthroughs implemented in our GeoCommons Web service platform required a very scalable and high-performance infrastructure. Sun met our needs with cost-effective solutions across our product lines."

Postful, Inc.
Taking web-based collaboration to a new level, Los-Angeles-based startup Postful, Inc. provides customers with an integrated print and mail utility service for the Web. The company offers small firms and mobile workers the resources of a large corporate mail room. It also provides a service where e-mails are sent via traditional mail benefiting the 65 million Americans who are not online.

The company previously hosted its service on a virtual private server (VPS) and then migrated to its own Linux-based servers, but required more reliability. After conducting an extensive search for alternatives, Postful chose the Sun Startup Essentials program which provided access to free software and enterprise grade-IT products at low prices and discounted Web hosting. As a result of choosing the Solaris 10 OS and the Sun Fire x64 servers, Postful has noted a fifty percent reduction in the amount of developer time spent maintaining servers and a forty five percent reduction in hosting costs.

"The Sun Startup Essentials program was my first direct contact with Sun and I am deeply impressed," said Justin Garten, Founder, Postful. "The switch to Sun has proved its worth many times. We can clearly see the advantages of Solaris over Linux. Additionally, the stability, tools and flexibility of Solaris are hugely valuable. As a result of using Sun, Postful has seen a thirty percent increase in performance and an eighty percent reduction in power and cooling costs. These are big savings that really impact the bottom line and our ability to offer customers a reliable and cost effective service."

SearchForce
SearchForce, a Web services software provider, offers agencies and advertisers a single united interface for search engine marketing and portfolio management. Advertising agencies with a vested interest in the search engine performance of millions of keywords benefit significantly from SearchForce's highly scalable platform, targeted at maximizing return on investment on pay-per-click marketing initiatives. After comparing the Solaris 10 OS on the Sun Fire x64 servers with other vendor offerings, SearchForce found that Sun's technologies offered better throughput numbers and a seventy percent decrease in power consumption.

Based on this information, SearchForce made the decision to move away from Dell servers powered by Red Hat Linux ES4 and leveraged Sun's Startup Essentials program to conduct a complete datacenter refresh. As a result of using Sun servers, the Solaris 10 OS and Sun StorageTek arrays, SearchForce has tripled throughput and enhanced its storage environment.

"By choosing Sun, we have cut costs and improved our performance, especially in the area of response time," said David Simon, Chairman, SearchForce. "Sun's Startup Essentials program was extremely helpful and enabled us to implement a full datacenter refresh in a cost effective and timely manner. We were particularly impressed to find that Sun Fire servers with CoolThreads technology can handle two to three times the load of our former machines while consuming about one quarter of the electricity used."

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.

TWiki, a flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise wiki, enterprise collaboration platform, and knowledge management system. It is a Structured Wiki, typically used to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base, or any other groupware tool, on an intranet or on the Internet. Web content can be created collaboratively by using just a browser. Users without programming skills can create web applications. Developers can extend the functionality of TWiki with Plugins. TWiki fosters information flow within an organization, lets distributed teams work together seamlessly and productively, and eliminates the one-webmaster syndrome of outdated intranet content.

EveryCity Ltd. provides a range of managed hosting services including specific offerings to Web 2.0 startup companies and digital agencies. The London-based company positions itself as a specialist in delivering custom-made managed hosting solutions along with scalable high bandwidth solutions on managed dedicated servers.

Joyent provides applications, tools, and unique, on-demand services and hardware solutions over the Web to small to medium-size businesses, e-businesses and developers. In addition, Joyent offers customers the option of using its tools and packaged application along with disk storage without having to build their own infrastructure.

Yuntaa is a Belgian Web 2.0 platform where users from around the world can store, manage, and share a variety of digital files such as photos, music, and videos. “Yuntaa” is Spanish slang for “alternative,” and the company prides itself in being an alternative choice on the Web. The online service combines the best of Web 2.0 applications with the security and benefits of online storage and backup. Founded in 2006, Yuntaa released its online solutions in June 2007 and continues to expand its base of 30,000 users.

Fast-Growing Web 2.0 Company Boosts Performance Sixfold by Switching from Linux to the Solaris 10 Operating System
Sapotek Inc., founded in 2002 with headquarters in New York, and operational offices in Toluca, Mexico, delivers on-demand solutions such as an online desktop in a software-as-a-service model, reaching approximately 200,000 users worldwide.

Sun-Based GlassFish and Open Message Queue Technology Provide Cost-Effective, Scalable Foundation for Busy Web Site
Wotif.com Holdings Limited operates Wotif.com, a high-traffic Web site that offers discount hotel bookings in more than 44 countries for business and leisure travelers. Launched in 2000, the Australian-based company has grown to become the number one hotel website in both Australia and New Zealand. Each month, Wotif.com attracts over 3.2 million visitors and processes more than 200,000 bookings for 11,000 hotel partners around the world.
Source(s):
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-03/sunflash.20080325.2.xml
http://sun.it-online.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&am...
http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/148365620.html
http://twiki.org
http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/everycity.xml
http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/sapotek.xml
http://www.sun.com/customers/index.xml?c=wotif.xml

Permalink | Report