Sapotek Inc.

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In the Internet age, why maintain a desktop full of applications? What if you could access a free online desktop, using a browser and Internet connection, and get the look, feel, and functionality of a PC? You could work from anywhere while storing your data conveniently on a central server.

This describes Desktoptwo, a free service from Sapotek that can be found at www.desktoptwo.com, and also available in Spanish at www.computadora.de. To date, almost 200,000 people worldwide have become users.

To help facilitate continued growth, Sapotek open-sourced its product and an active free software community – Sapodesk – is now expanding its capabilities. As of mid-2007, the challenge was to see if the company’s infrastructure could scale as fast as the popularity of its service.

That’s why Sapotek evaluated the Sun Startup Essentials program, which provides discounted hardware and hosting services, as well as free software and technical advice. However, the company would need to switch from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to the Solaris 10 Operating System to join the program.

“At first we wondered why we’d switch,” says Joshua Rand, CEO of Sapotek. “But after talking with people at Sun and conducting our own research, we migrated to the Solaris OS for three reasons: better scalability, enhanced performance, and high availability. We got them all.”

Previously, Sapotek ran Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell servers and had been maxing out at five concurrent threads per server. “When we raised the number of threads beyond five, resource use increased but performance did not,” says Oscar Mondragon, chief technology officer at Sapotek. “Since switching to the Solaris 10 OS on Sun Fire X4200 servers, we’ve been able to push the number of threads to 32 for a sixfold increase in performance.”

In addition, availability has risen to 99.99 percent with the Solaris 10 OS, up from 96 percent with Linux. As a result, according to Rand, “Our developers have been able to focus more on the development of our services and less on their deployment. At a small company like Sapotek where continual development is the norm and where many employees wear multiple hats, that has increased our productivity dramatically.”

According to Mondragon, “The ZFS file system feature of the Solaris 10 OS is a marvel. It creates a common storage pool where all storage performs as fast as if it were local. Our administrators can grow, add or remove storage on the fly in a single step. Just 2 people administer 24 terabytes.”

The company also uses the snapshot feature in the ZFS file system and has reduced backup and recovery times by 99 percent—from hours or even days to just minutes. “It’s now practical to take a snapshot of the system on the fly, before we make a change or upgrade, and we can revert back to it in seconds if there’s a problem,” Mondragon says. “We can make changes more safely and get services to market faster.”

Additionally, Sapotek moved to Sun Advantage Partner NaviSite for its hosting, reducing hosting costs by 50 percent. The company also deployed a single Sun Fire X4500 server to gain the highest storage density available, replacing four Dell/EMC storage systems. “That reduced our storage footprint by 75 percent, further lowering hosting costs,” Mondragon notes.

During the first five months with Sun, Sapotek doubled its user base. “Now,” Rand concludes, “we are prepared to double our customer base many times over.”