Moodlerooms, Inc.

Success at a Glance

As a strong advocate for open source learning systems, Moodlerooms wanted to position Moodle software as a compelling solution in the education market. But first the company had to convince large education enterprises that open source solutions provide a viable alternative to more familiar proprietary products. To do so, Moodlerooms needed to demonstrate that it could deliver the reliability and scalability necessary for business-critical education systems.

Moodle is a Web-based Learning Management Software (LMS) system distributed at no cost under an open source license. Moodlerooms provides hosted services that support the open source LMS product and competes with vendors that offer comparable but proprietary education systems. To step into the ring with Moodle software, Moodlerooms needed infrastructure that could support a reliable, highly scalable enterprise-class solution.

Moodlerooms based its infrastructure on Sun Microsystems technology due to its avid support of open source solutions and because it knew Sun would deliver the performance it needed. In addition, Moodlerooms was producing reference architecture it could use to validate and support large-scale implementations and recognized that the Sun solution was the right one for this project.

To get off to a running start, the company decided to join Sun Startup Essentials, a program that helps new businesses take advantage of Sun technology through discounted prices and other incentives. Through the program, Moodlerooms acquired a collection of Sun Fire 4100 servers at a reduced price.

Moodlerooms built its datacenter around Sun Fire T2000 servers with Sun UltraSPARC T1 processors and the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). The company uses two Sun Fire T2000 servers to support its static Web-tier environment and installed a rack of ten Sun Fire T2000 servers to generate loads for scalability tests. The company also installed a cluster with x64 Sun Fire 4600 servers to support its reference architecture, and Sun Fire X4100 and X4200 servers to handle MySQL database transactions. "The combination of MySQL and Sun provides us with unlimited possibilities in ensuring the highest level of quality assurance and advanced feature contributions to the world's leading open source initiatives, including Moodle," says Stuart Sim, CTO and Chief Architect at Moodlerooms. The entire server infrastructure is connected to storage architecture through a Fibre Channel network.

In addition to delivering high performance, the compact Sun Fire T2000 servers with CoolThreads technology enabled the company to run an energy-efficient datacenter with a near-zero-carbon footprint. Server virtualization and partitioning with Solaris Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms) technology also helped consolidate hardware and and strengthened data control and security.

Moodlerooms teamed with Sun on a project to simulate a load of one-million concurrent users. Moodlerooms generated the enormous load of HTTP requests needed by taking advantage of the Sun Fire T2000 Server's capability for producing multiple simultaneous processing threads. The reference architecture from the project will be freely available to any organization. “We demonstrated that if you can run a million concurrent students with Solaris 10 on Moodle software, you can run Solaris on anything,” Sim says.

Moodlerooms also gets a performance boost by deploying the Moodle PHP application stack and reference architecture on Cool Stack, the Sun Optimized AMP Stack for the Solaris 10 OS. Moodlerooms also integrated Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) with Solaris Cool Stack to monitor and troubleshoot systemic issues in real time.

Moodlerooms expects to speed Moodle adoption through its proven success in running large-scale implementations on Sun architecture. In addition, decreased energy consumption combined with the stability and low cost of ownership using Solaris 10 resulted in considerable savings the company can pass on to its customers.