LinkedIn

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As a growing social networking site, LinkedIn focuses on business relationships. But to deliver the best possible user experience, LinkedIn needed to improve its software and hardware infrastructure. So LinkedIn asked Sun to help it deliver better performance to its users while creating a scalable, manageable database solution that would support future growth.

LinkedIn has been a Sun customer from the time that its site went live in May 2003. The online networking site had also relied on MySQL database software for four years, long predating Sun's acquisition of that product. But by early 2008, the demands on the highly successful site put increasing pressure on the computing infrastructure, especially on the database servers. The response time for some Web operations had increased significantly as downloads surged to 200 million per day and the database swelled to 120GB.

LinkedIn, which had already invested heavily in a Sun-based infrastructure – including a mix of Sun servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System as well as the MySQL database – turned to Sun in April 2008 for help. With its solution running in a production environment, LinkedIn could not afford to take any chances. "Time is critical for us," says Jean-Luc Vaillant, chief technology officer at LinkedIn. "Our business is experiencing exponential growth, so when we can't deal with an issue immediately, Sun steps in to help us meet our needs."

Sun's MySQL Professional Services team responded to the request and conducted a thorough review. The LinkedIn database system uses Oracle and MySQL database servers. The servers are synchronized with software that "listens to" change events from the Oracle database and pushes these changes to the MySQL database servers. However, with high demand, the servers could not stay in sync, resulting in backlogs that slowed performance.

Based on the suggestion of Sun Professional Services, LinkedIn purchased a MySQL Enterprise Platinum subscription. MySQL Enterprise provides LinkedIn with regular software updates, and advanced database monitoring tools that can immediately find and address any system bottlenecks or security vulnerabilities by continually checking on the system's health. In addition, LinkedIn gained access to 24/7 MySQL technical support, along with onsite assistance from a Professional Services expert, who performed deeper fine-tuning to further optimize performance. The optimization took only two weeks to complete.

To provide additional hardware support for its site, LinkedIn deployed the newest CMT technology with the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, as well as the Sun Fire T2000 running various Oracle applications. And to help manage their growth, they choose the highly scalable Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000, offering industry leading RAS features, and the capability to easily accommodate future growth. Their infrastructure totals over 500 servers, including the Sun Fire X4100 M2 servers with the AMD Opteron dual-core processors, and they are evaluating Solaris Cluster for failover capability. Their satisfaction with Solaris 10 made the purchase of additional servers an easy choice.

For LinkedIn, the timing of Sun's acquisition of MySQL could not have been better. By drawing on the MySQL team at Sun Professional services, the LinkedIn IT team built on the open source solution it had previously adopted. At the same time, it optimized performance and gained easy-to-use monitoring tools from Sun – as well as ready access to technical support.

As a result of Sun's software, hardware and assistance, LinkedIn increased query performance by 54 percent, while decreasing the database size by 39 percent. What's more, LinkedIn now has a cost-effective, integrated database solution that can easily scale to support future needs. Asked about Sun's commercial offerings and support for open source, Vaillant concludes, "The trajectory in which Sun is going with both its hardware and its software is definitely in the right direction. As far as I can tell, there is no other partner right now that is so advanced."