With the outsourcing market dominated by a few giants, NaviSite has carved out a profitable segment by offering application management, infrastructure hosting, and content delivery services to mid-market enterprises. Based in Andover, Massachusetts, the outsourcing company has more than 1,500 customers, including Johns Hopkins University and the U.S. Department of State.
NaviSite continues to explore new ways to leverage its virtualization infrastructure to keep up with increasing client demands. Specifically, the company wanted flexibility to deploy variable processing capacity quickly and support a wider range of operating systems and applications.
“
We are really excited about the Sun Blade platform running VMware. It allows us to offer added value to our customers and keep our administration costs low. The use of Sun in our virtualization platform not only allows us to continue to provide a flexible and scalable platform, but does so at a competitive price. And even more importantly, it allows us to expand our support of additional operating system environments—something we don’t believe other service providers can say.
”
— Denis Martin, EVP & Chief Technology Officer, NaviSite, Inc.
NaviSite decided it needed to add more scalable servers to its server virtualization platform. The company began evaluating several server hardware platforms that would deliver the right price point, performance, and support. The evaluation team considered a wide range of server configurations, including rack-mountable servers from several vendors, and even large enterprise-class servers.
Sun was one of the contenders based on its long successful relationship with NaviSite. NaviSite frequently implements Sun UltraSPARC servers with the Solaris Operation System for applications that require a high level of performance, reliability, and security. NaviSite selected the Sun Blade Modular Systems running VMware ESX software to add to its existing virtualization platform. The deciding factors were a favorable price per computing unit, better I/O design than its competitors, and the SunSpectrum per-chassis support model. Sun’s relationship with VMware was another plus for this combination.
NaviSite’s designers worked with Sun’s engineering team to work out details of the system design and to calculate the expected performance and capacity of the Sun Blade system.“We especially like the modularity of the Sun Blade system,” says Chris Little, customer service engineer for NaviSite. “It’s very compact in its design, offers lots of redundancy, and is easy to maintain.”
NaviSite deployed its first Sun Blade 8000 chassis, and recently purchased the Sun Blade 6000 chassis with Sun Blade X6250 server modules. The company plans to continue to expand the Sun Blade footprint as all segments of its business grow. Its customers always respond enthusiastically when they can add incremental computing capacity without needing further capital investment or a protracted upgrade path. The flexible solution from Sun Microsystems and VMware meets those needs because capacity can be provisioned quickly, with far less administration overhead than is needed with other server platforms.
NaviSite is also expanding its service offerings to Web 2.0 startups and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Startups and established enterprises typically have different flexibility and scalability requirements. Thus, NaviSite will offer Sun Startup Essentials program members flexible Web hosting options based on Solaris Containers virtualization technology and Sun Blade systems. With Sun Blade systems and Solaris Containers, NaviSite can offer compute and storage resources in small increments to its startup customers and, at the same time, provide them the flexibility and scalability to adapt the infrastructure to meet business needs.
