Lifetouch

Story Details

With the company tagline of “photography for a lifetime,” Lifetouch doesn't just take pictures; it preserves lasting memories for tens of thousands of customers. Among the company's business challenges is rapid growth through the new studios in Target and J.C. Penney and its own Flash! studios, an expanding customer base of schools and churches, and acquisition of other companies. “Our business is very seasonal, with peak periods in the fall and spring,” says Karl Schubert, Lifetouch's chief technology officer and corporate vice president of research and development. “During those times, the number of data, images, and transactions we deal with is orders of magnitude higher than at other times of the year, so we need very robust telecommunications, server, and storage systems.”

Lifetouch has been using Sun products since 2001. In the portrait studios, it manages image databases using Sun's MySQL database; in the datacenter, it is upgrading existing servers with new Sun products. Lifetouch selected Sun hardware and the Solaris 10 Operating System for its high-reliability, high-performing transaction and business processing systems. “The stability of Sun's servers and Solaris along with Sun's reputation for high quality validated our decision to select Sun as our vendor. Additionally, Solaris provides excellent support on AMD and Intel's x86 platforms, giving us the ability to bring up a broad range of platforms with ease,” says Schubert.

In March 2008, Lifetouch upgraded its existing Sun Fire T1000 servers to Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers. “Over the next 18 months, we will be bringing new applications online to increasing productivity in our regional offices and portrait studios,” says Schubert. “To do that we need the capabilities of the newer servers and operating systems...by virtualizing the data and applications, we have a means of protecting them from application outages by failover and very fast recovery.”

Lifetouch has seen numerous benefits by upgrading it's operating system from Solaris 8 & 9 to Solaris 10. “The compatibility and virtualization features that come with Solaris 10 and on the hardware really are superior to other vendors' solutions,” says Schubert. “Additionally, upgrading to Solaris 10 gives us the capability to get all of our systems onto contemporary hardware, and that's a big deal for risk avoidance and better total cost of ownership,” says Schubert. A key initiative of Schubert's is to move to a fully virtualized environment — including different types of storage such as NAS and SAN.

Integral to the smooth operation of Lifetouch IT environments is the role of Sun's support services. “We have received very good support from Sun. The customer service has been informative and extremely helpful,” says Schubert. Lifetouch has SunSpectrum support at the platinum, gold, and silver levels on its Sun systems. “We expect good customer service from a company like Sun,” says Schubert, “and we are very satisfied with what we are getting.”

Schubert is quick to list the benefits of the new Sun products, not the least of which is a return on investment (ROI) down from five or more years to three years. “Uptime and reliability have been excellent, and we get very good high performance computing (HPC) for the value. This has been invaluable in reducing our total cost of ownership,” says Schubert. He adds that Sun's CoolThreads technology delivers more raw processing power and better I/O performance without requiring more power and cooling. “Sun provides us with a reliable, cost-effective, continually developing platform to create applications that allow us to run our business and be competitive,” says Schubert. “We're looking forward to developing a strong, strategic relationship with Sun.”

*estimated revenues for fiscal year 2007 from Hoovers.com