FortiusOne

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Like all startup companies, resources and especially costs are an area of focus for FortiusOne. Yet, a robust platform was required to handle the real-time rendering and memory-intensive processing of the company's intelligent mapping application. It needed to strike a delicate balance between costs and the performance, reliability, flexibility and scalability of the infrastructure to ensure success.

The company began by researching commodity-type solutions from several popular hardware vendors. Costs were in line with the budget, but FortiusOne Chief Technology Officer Chris Ingrassia feared that the company would need to replace these products in one or two years. He was concerned that they were not scalable enough to meet processing requirements as FortiusOne grew.

Familiar with Sun, Ingrassia trusted its products to deliver the scalability and reliability he needed. He was intrigued by the current Sun server product lines and found the pricing attractive. FortiusOne had not made a final decision when it learned about Sun Startup Essentials, a program with pricing and other incentives to help new companies build their businesses on Sun technologies. This solidified FortiusOne's decision.

The company initially purchased the Sun Fire T1000 and the Sun Fire V40z servers through the program. Both servers were running Red Hat Fedora Core 7 operating system, which handled parallel and distributed processing as the company developed and tested the mapping Web services platform. FortiusOne knew that these systems had the capabilities it needed to bring the GeoCommons mapping solution to market more quickly.

As GeoCommons entered the market, FortiusOne needed to create a production environment to run the Web site and render and store the maps. Again, the company took advantage of the Sun Startup Essentials program. A Sun Fire X4100 M2 server, with a customized version of Linux and Enterprise DB, runs the large databases for GeoCommons. An existing Sun Fire V40z handles most of the rendering, and an 8-terabyte Sun StorageTek 6140 array addresses data storage needs.

This infrastructure has performed well for FortiusOne, allowing members of an extended community to come to the online site to create intelligent maps of interest to them. Ingrassia trusts the server platform to scale and believes the entire FortiusOne team sleeps better at night, knowing the servers have lights out management features for remote administration and management.

Based on the popularity of the public site, governments, organizations and businesses have expressed the need to apply these intelligent mapping capabilities to their internal business problems. Some of these customers require behind-the-firewall standalone implementations and FortiusOne worked with the Sun OEM program to create an appliance based on the Sun Fire X4500 server for these applications. The company credits the Sun Startup Essentials program for putting it in touch with the right Sun people for its OEM needs and also appreciates the support of Sun partners in designing the OEM appliance solution.