myToys.de

Story Details

myToys.de. is a retail company that sells merchandise for children and their families. Since it was founded in 1999, the company has nearly doubled its revenue every year. Based in Berlin, myToys.de now distributes its goods online, in stores, and through a mail-order catalog.

When myToys.de began its operations, the company relied on Linux for most of its computing systems, given the operating system’s good reputation and low cost. During this period, the company chose products that were considered sound and affordable, but it did not purchase professional support from the suppliers because their support costs are often high. However, over time, its IT environment became heterogeneous, combining Linux and BSD systems with EMC storage and other non-proprietary products, and support became an issue.

In response, myToys.de began looking at solutions from vendors with a reputation for quality service, and it chose Sun Fire V20z and V40z x86-based servers and Solaris Operating System to support email-based customer service. Given the positive experience the company had with those servers and with the Solaris Operating System, myToys.de purchased its first SPARC Enterprise servers to support its larger, critical ERP system. Similarly, when the company’s EMC platform became unable to support growing storage needs, the company switched to the Sun StorEdge 6130 array. “While using the 6130 system, our administrators were able to see the advantages of professional support,” explains Olaf Brehmer, head of System Administration at myToys.de. “They showed us how use the system efficiently and optimize it for our environment.”

The positive experience myToys.de had with the Sun Fire V40z and V20z servers led it to select Sun Fire X4100 and later X4200 servers as part of an operating system consolidation. The company also implemented a secure backup system based on the Sun StorageTek 6140 array. As a result, Sun became an integral part of myToys.de’s IT landscape, and it increasingly asked its multichannel supplier to include Sun products among the available choices when new IT projects arose.

For the company’s most recent IT upgrade, it chose SPARC-based systems. Several Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers work in a cluster as database and data warehouse servers and also as application servers for Oracle applications. Specifically, five of these SPARC M5000 servers provide back-end support, eight SPARC Enterprise T1000 servers function as Web servers, and 12 Sun Fire AMD processor based servers complement the SPARC M5000 servers as application servers for the Oracle database. All of these servers run the Solaris 10 OS. In addition, Sun StorageTek 6540 arrays along with Sun SPARC hardware drive the company’s ERP system.

In a separate project, customer service at myToys.de recently upgraded its workstations to include Sun Ray virtual display clients and Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software. “Sun is now our main vendor,” says Brehmer. “Sun provides us with the right server for each application area, and at the same time. We profit from the good scalability that is offered within its product lines.” In addition, the increasingly homogeneous landscape lets employees focus their skills on customers rather than on many different technologies.

Brehmer continues, “Our Sun M-Series servers are extremely reliable, guaranteeing that our online store can continue its exponential growth without any problems.” Furthermore, Brehmer can be sure that if a system fails, SunSpectrum Platinum service plan will quickly resolve the problem. “Whenever we have issues, the system is always up and running again before the end of the day.”

Continuing on the importance of the reliability of the new Sun system, Brehmer adds, “Our demands for performance, redundancy, and minimal downtime have grown along with our increased business. When problems occur, the response time from Sun is fast, the contacts are good, and if we need additional hardware on an ad hoc basis, there aren’t any problems. The collaboration with Sun is extremely professional. It really couldn’t get any better.”