C.A. Mobile, Ltd.
Getting Twice the Capacity and Lower Overhead Costs with Sun Fire CoolThreads Servers And the Solaris 10 Operating SystemC.A. Mobile, based in Tokyo, Japan, offers media services for mobile phones, including e-commerce solutions, ringtones and games, and advertising creation and placement. The 350-person company was founded in 2000 as a subsidiary of CyberAgent, Inc., a major Japanese provider of online media and shopping services. C.A. Mobile now has operations in China and the U.S., and hopes to expand globally. Its annual revenue was more than 10.8 billion yen (US$93.6 million) in fiscal 2006. Business Issues
SolutionC.A. Mobile replaced the Intel-based servers in its datacenter with 72 multi-threaded, energy-efficient Sun Fire servers using CoolThreads technology. The company has already migrated several of its consumer content sites onto the Sun Fire infrastructure; it plans to migrate the rest by the end of 2007.
Success at a GlanceC.A. Mobile, Ltd., had a problem many companies would envy: too much growth. The 350-person company is one of Japan’s leading providers of marketing services and content for mobile devices. But providing fresh, engaging content with color, motion and sound to millions of customers requires large amounts of computing power and storage, with high reliability. C.A. Mobile’s technology infrastructure also had to scale up quickly and be cost effective. The company realized that its previous strategy–relying on large numbers of identical low-cost, Intel-based servers running Linux–would not support its long-term business plans.
“
Using low-power-consumption servers resulted in reduced rack and electricity expenses. The more we use, the faster the return on our investment; we anticipate the returns in no time. By switching to high-performance Sun servers, we can slow down the pace of server growth, and system administration will be much easier.
”
— Tomohiko Saito, System Group Manager, C.A. Mobile
The turning point came in fall 2006, when C.A. Mobile was looking to open a new datacenter. Commodity Intel-based servers would generate high electric bills and take up considerable floor space, and the maintenance needed would burden the IT staff. C.A. Mobile realized that instead of continually adding more machines, it could switch to a smaller number of low-power-consumption but high-performance servers. The company evaluated servers from several vendors. Noting the low power requirements and high performance of Sun Fire CoolThreads servers and the advanced functionality and stability of The Solaris 10 Operating System, C.A. Mobile took one back to its office for testing and was impressed with the results. It was even more pleased with the full datacenter proposal it got from Sun. “Our initial plan was a terabyte-class network-attached storage (NAS) configuration with over 100 Intel-based servers,” says Tomohiko Saito, System Group Manager at C.A. Mobile. “But Sun’s proposal cut the number of servers by nearly half while tripling the content storage capacity with the Sun Fire X4500s at the same price range.” C.A. Mobile adopted a configuration of 50 Sun Fire T1000 machines serving the Web site, 10 Sun Fire T2000s supporting the database and 2 Sun Fire X4500s providing content storage for ringtones and songs. All the servers run Solaris 10. Installation started in April 2007 and the company has already migrated one of its most popular services, a baseball fan site, to the new datacenter. Other content services will follow by the end of 2007. The company regards the cost advantage of Sun Fire servers highly. While the initial cost is somewhat higher when compared with Intel-based servers, they allowed C.A. Mobile to cut spending on racks and electricity. The servers allow 1.5 to 2 times more space to be saved through high-density storage. C.A. Mobile is also getting higher scalability, according to System Group Specialist Soichiro Nedate, who helped design the system architecture. “Applying 1.5 to 2 times the conventional load hardly affects the response,” he says. “In addition, the system overall has improved in stability by utilizing Solaris Containers to distribute services on virtual OS,” Nedate adds. “And for day-to-day system administration, it really helps that routine tasks, from turning the power on and off to system reinstallation, can be performed remotely from the office.” C.A. Mobile now intends to adopt Cool Threads servers for all its future needs. “When we used Intel-based servers, we had to keep adding three racks (about 100 servers) every three months,” says Saito. “But by switching to high-performance Sun servers, we can slow down the pace of server growth, and system administration will be much easier.” |
| ||||||||||||||
 |
| ||||||||||||||