Lokalisten.de

Story Details

The Lokalisten community platform is one of the fastest growing community platforms in Germany. It emerged from the idea of the five founders, who wanted to develop a platform for their own circle of friends. More than 35,000 members use the platform daily, with traffic peaking at 4,500 concurrent users. Lokalisten.de needed to increase capacity due to its exponential growth. The social network started with a typical low cost configuration on a single-processor x86 server, then expanded the hardware architecture with additional x86 servers. However, the throughput of the x86 servers was not sufficient to meet the increasing requirements.

A Sun Fire T2000 server was supplied by Sun as part of the Try and Buy Program. With an extremely limited budget, Lokalisten.de found Sun’s offer to try its server risk-free for 60 days attractive. Lokalisten.de deployed Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers running Solaris 10 and optimized for highly parallel Internet applications. With the eight-core UltraSPARC T1 processor, the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 Internet servers can process up 32 tasks simultaneously. This makes them ideal for dynamic Internet applications serving many users concurrently.

Installation was carried out by the IT specialists at Space.Net, a service provider, who set up the application servers. The whole process went without a hitch. At the same time, Space.Net ported the Java server application to Solaris 10 - again without a hitch. The server went into operation and has been running with absolutely no problems ever since, despite increasing usage levels. The platform is now accessed by up to 6,000 users concurrently. As with the installation, operation of the system is also running smoothly - to the great satisfaction of the circle of friends in the Lokalisten community.