eHarmony.com

Success at a Glance

On an average day in the United States, more than 90 eHarmony.com members marry as a result of being matched on the leading Internet relationship site. There are now more than 14 million registered eHarmony users, with 10,000-15,000 new members joining every day from inside the U.S. and from over 200 countries worldwide. At the start of 2007, the Web site was generating more than 250 million page views and 45 million e-mail messages per month.

Unlike most online dating sites, which require users to browse through profiles and make their own connections, eHarmony matches singles based on key attributes that predict compatibility and relationship success. eHarmony members complete online questionnaires, receive matches and then begin a unique process of getting acquainted based on electronic messaging. The heavy traffic and data analysis place unusual demands on eHarmony’s IT team, which must ensure that the site operates reliably and efficiently, even as membership continues to skyrocket.

In late 2006, the IT team recognized the need to replace the database servers supporting its online services. The legacy servers lacked the raw processing power and flexible architecture required to scale much further and accommodate business growth. In addition, eHarmony was approaching the limits of the electric power available at its Los Angeles datacenter and was looking for opportunities to deploy more power-efficient systems.

After evaluating the alternatives, eHarmony asked Sun for the chance to evaluate Sun Fire X4600 servers with AMD Opteron processors. Sun arranged for the free evaluation through the Sun Try and Buy program. With the Try and Buy unit, eHarmony quickly established that the Sun x64 servers could reduce power requirements for its database servers by up to 40% in the same rack space while significantly improving performance.

“Sun's Try and Buy program gave us an easy, risk-free way to evaluate the Sun systems and how they would perform in our environment,” says Mark Douglas, Vice President of Technology at eHarmony. “Within two days, we had the proof of improved performance we needed to go ahead and deploy the servers.”

Based on the Try and Buy results, eHarmony deployed three Sun Fire X4600 servers, each with 8 dual-core AMD Opteron processors, in a 48-core cluster with 196 gigabytes of memory. The broadly compatible Sun Fire servers run a Linux version at eHarmony. The servers also allowed the IT team to further improve performance and add clustering capabilities for high availability by upgrading its database software to Oracle 10g RAC.

With Sun’s help, eHarmony continues to offer a satisfying user experience to its fast-growing membership. The combined server and database upgrade has helped eHarmony shave up to a full second off the response times for all the site’s features. For example, a page that formerly took two seconds to load will now load in one second.

By switching to Sun, eHarmony can reduce datacenter costs by deriving significantly more processing power out of the same amount of physical space and electric power it had been using. Sun’s versatile architecture was also a key advantage for eHarmony. Sun x64 servers are completely modular, allowing for processor boards, power supplies and cooling fans to be easily upgraded.

The eHarmony and Sun relationship is just getting started. Given all the advantages, eHarmony intends to gradually replace all its servers with Sun systems.