Symeos

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As e-commerce has grown, businesses have seen an increasing number of online scams and identity thefts. To help tackle these problems and boost security, France’s Symeos develops innovative technologies to help protect organizations against such attacks.

Because the demand for online identity management and authentication solutions continues to increase, Symeos created a new identity management product called EGO. In addition to offering comprehensive Web-site security for businesses, the solution is incredibly straightforward for end users. They simply download a small application to their mobile phones, which in turn provides them with a unique password for single sign-on to multiple Web-based services and applications.

To support the more than 10 million expected users of EGO, the company needed a completely new virtualized platform. With multiple IT vendors to choose from, Symeos turned to Sun, which offers many advantages. First, along with fellow members such as SAP, Sony, and Vodafone, it helped launch the Liberty Alliance to drive open, interoperable standards for federated authentication. This would ensure a high level of trust for any Sun-based solution. Second, Sun offers programs that would help Symeos fund and build the platform. These include the Try & Buy program, which gives companies the opportunity to try Sun products free, and the Startup Essentials program, which offers discounts, training, and opportunities.

Among the criteria for choosing the platform’s hardware, Symeos wanted high performance and low energy consumption. The technology at the heart of the platform also had to be fast, scalable, and secure — and it had to be open source to keep costs down.

The company ordered 8 Sun Blade T6340 Server Modules with UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors and 12 Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules with Intel Xeon processors. It also purchased two Sun Blade 6000 Chassis to house the machines. To protect the platform’s data, the company chose a Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System together with a Sun Storage J4000 Array. The infrastructure runs on the Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Operating Systems.

The blade servers provide support for Web solutions that include the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3, the Sun GlassFish Web Space Server 10, and the open-source offerings of the MySQL database, the Sun OpenDS directory server, and Sun OpenSSO Enterprise product for Web access management, federation, and Web services.

Herve Prot, chief executive officer for Symeos, says, “Because of their large memory and robust I/O architecture, the Sun Blade T6340 Server Modules were ideal for a demanding environment. They also offered zero-cost virtualization, thanks to the Solaris 10 Operating System with Solaris Containers and Logical Domains. Plus, with up to 32 GB of RAM per machine, the Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules provided the power and efficiency to complete a highly available platform.” The Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System gave the company a simplified system for protecting up to half a petabyte of data. “By combining disk storage and solid-state disks, you get increased performance and less energy usage at a lower price point,” says Prot.

After testing the Sun Blade servers, Symeos built the finished platform over a period of two months. The hardware is divided so that the Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules largely support the MySQL database, and the Sun Blade T6340 Server Modules deliver the Web solutions including authentication and authorization. The company, which once used Apache Tomcat as its Web application server, found it could launch a new application 12% quicker with the GlassFish Enterprise Server v3.

The CoolThreads technology of the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors in the Sun Blade T6340 Server Modules delivered exceptional power while consuming 10% less energy than comparable servers. Says Prot, “It is fair to say that the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors are at the heart of our EGO strategy. They deliver the reliability and performance to support a huge number of users at the same time.” In addition, Symeos spends 20% less on power costs for the new platform.

Even though the infrastructure offers significant data capacity, Symeos reduced its storage arrays from six-and-a-half to five. Because the platform is hosted externally, the savings will amount to approximately €21,600 over a year. Finally, by using open-source and open-standard technology throughout, the business expects to lower future development by about 60%.

By June 2009, Symeos customers were testing the platform, which the company plans to launch at the end of the year. Prot comments, “Thanks to Sun technology, we are continuing to bring innovative identity management solutions to market and driving growth.”