DigiTar

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DigiTar is a Web 2.0 company that drives value to customers through state-of-the-art technology development. The company’s services enhance existing messaging systems with next-generation capabilities such as "DNA-based" spam filtering that uses deep contextual analysis to block spam with an unprecedented accuracy rate of 99+ percent. The company’s proprietary messaging stack, built from the ground up, has a highly scalable, highly redundant architecture that supports customers ranging from small startups to global organizations with thousands of users.

As a company that views pushing the technology envelope as a way of life, DigiTar does not settle for standard performance in the server, storage and communications infrastructure that underlies its services. In 2006, when COO and CTO Jason Williams heard from a Sun sales rep about the breakthrough performance and power efficiency of Sun Fire T2000 servers based on Sun CoolThreads technology, his team was skeptical at first. But when the rep suggested a risk-free trial run of the servers through the Sun Try and Buy Program, Williams and his team agreed.

DigiTar put the servers through their paces, testing their ability to run the MySQL database component of the company’s messaging services and comparing performance to DigiTar's existing HP DL145 G2 database servers. The work they did testing and tuning their systems helped in the development of Sun's Cool Tools technology toolset. The Sun T2000 servers achieved results that convinced Williams’ operations team to adopt them. Eight HP servers in four paired clusters were consolidated into a single pair of Sun Fire T2000s.

DigiTar is using OpenSolaris to further improve the performance and efficiency of its T2000 database servers. The Solaris Operating System allows DigiTar to optimize its utilization of the T2000s by running multiple instances of the MySQL database on the same server. In addition, the ZFS file system in Solaris 10 automates and simplifies database storage administration, reducing the administration time required for tasks such as identifying and fixing database corruption by days or even weeks.

Additionally, DigiTar became an active member of the Open Solaris user community, and was a beta site for the FISHworks application stack that became a core component of the new Sun Storage 7000 series of open storage products. Says Williams: “In our business, we're constantly analyzing new spam data for updating our DNA training databases. Some of that process involves data mining for larger trends. By deploying the the S7410, with its write- and read-optimized SSDs, we have reduced the time for our longest data mining jobs from 2 days to under 5 hours. It has made a huge difference in allowing us to respond even more quickly to the changing threat environment for our customers. This has translated into increased sales and lower customer service costs.” DigiTar was no stranger to Sun storage solutions, having relied on Sun StorageTek technology for data storage since its startup days. The company is also now leveraging a Sun Open Storage solution based on the Sun Fire X4500 server with Solaris ZFS technology as the primary storage for its databases.

The T2000 servers are just part of an increasing use of Sun solutions at DigiTar, which is also deploying Sun Fire X2100 M2 and Sun Fire X4100 servers for select database operations. In addition, DigiTar uses the Sun N1216 switch for load balancing. The Sun gear has allowed DigiTar to consolidate eight of its old switches down to two, reducing the cost of load balancing equipment by more than half while improving the ability of the team to monitor and manage the flow of messages in and out of its datacenter.

“One thing developers never seem to have enough of are sandbox servers,” notes Williams. “Places where they can try out any crazy idea or implementation without fear of destroying established test platforms or production environments. To address this issue for DigiTar, we have deployed a Sun Fire X4600 M2 server running VMware ESXi 3.5. When coupled with our new S7410 system (over NFS), this has allowed us to run nearly 30 different sandbox virtual machines at any given time.”

He elaborates: “Where before, developers would have to go through a long process to wait for a physical server to become available, or for one of their smaller VMware boxes to become less utilized, now DigiTar has enough virtualization capacity to support the creativity of any developer. With the huge amount of performance and capacity available to us, we can now also store an almost infinite number of developer sandbox virtual machines...meaning more productivity time for our developers and less time spent setting up their environments. This has lead to an explosion in new features we will be releasing over the next year.”

By leveraging Sun services, advanced developer tools and the Sun OpenSolaris storage community approach to creating and upgrading storage software and other applications, DigiTar saves time and, more importantly, significantly cuts costs in its datacenter. Find out more at: blogs.digitar.com/jjww/

“Sun has provided a platform for the democratization of the storage industry,” says Williams. “We have found the appropriate level of operating system support we need to run our business through the OpenSolaris storage community, which saves significant time and money. I participate in the community daily and see real business value in the projects that are being created by some of the industry's most important players.

"Something that stands out about Sun is that they care about our infrastructure, and care about keeping us up and running," says Williams. "That's something you can't undercut on price."