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Success is a major challenge for many new Web 2.0 businesses. Particularly for entrepreneurs using their own money, there's not always the cash to develop IT infrastructures that'll give their businesses the edge. Similarly, there isn't the kind of support around that's going to help them drive growth.

ONEIS was aware of these challenges as it went into beta testing in early 2008. The company, which is self funded, had a great business proposition. Small consultancy companies classically have problems handling their information effectively. It’s a Catch-22 scenario. They lack the quantities of information to warrant a large management system, yet the programs found in most suites of office applications don’t offer the required depth of functionality. On paper, ONEIS had a ready-made market out there waiting. All that remained was finding the right server hardware and support to put ONEIS on the road to success.

What amounted to the right server hardware was a complex issue. “Just a few years ago, if you wrote down on a piece of paper what an IT company wanted out of a server, the list would contain the usual suspects of power, performance, and scalability,” says Ben Summers, who runs ONEIS with colleague Jennifer Smith. “However in 2008, that list has grown and somewhere near the top is energy efficiency, not least because of the rising costs of electricity.”

As he began to think about what servers to choose, Summers had a slight sinking feeling. There was always the risk of picking hardware that was too expensive for a startup company to upgrade in the future. Plus, whatever server solution he bought, there was no avoiding the fact ONEIS had to deal with the hardware provider’s support services ― and his experience with support services hadn’t been good. “It’s not unusual to contact a support center where, after a long wait, you start speaking to someone who’s clearly not an IT professional, who’s reading from a script,” he says. “You don’t come away having had a particularly good experience and you’re made to feel kind of insignificant.”

At the top of Summers' IT wish list were Sun servers. He had experience of the performance and massive reductions in power consumption gained from consolidating five enterprise x86 servers used for his consultancy work onto a single Sun Fire X2100 M2 running the Solaris 10 Operating System. “Suddenly we had 4U rack of servers down to a single U and 2kW of power cut to 300W — a reduction of 85 percent. It ticked all the boxes when it came to delivering performance and creating a sustainable IT environment.”

Summers also liked the complete ease of installation. “With the X2100, it was really simple to deploy, unlike hardware from other manufacturers. It installed first time and took me about four hours, when normally I’d spend a few days getting a server up and running.”

Towards the end of 2007, he ordered a Sun Fire X4150 to run the ONEIS application. “The Sun Fire X4150 is perfect,” comments Summers. “It is a very powerful machine, but energy-efficient. When Summers deployed the X4150, he also installed the Solaris 10 OS along with open source applications such as Apache and PostgreSQL. “If you want an operating system that can deal with 16 or more cores, then it has to be Solaris,” comments Summers. The beauty of Solaris 10, he adds, is not just the fact that it can be downloaded easily from the Sun Web site, but that it offers virtualization technology with Solaris Containers. “It means we can create zones and run multiple applications on a single server, improving utilization rates,” he says. A firm believer in an N+1 level of redundancy, Summers then added another Sun Fire X4150 to complete the basic ONEIS IT platform.

At this stage, Summers was already planning ahead. He was thinking about taking the ONEIS infrastructure to the next level with Sun CoolThreads servers, based on the innovative UltraSPARC T1, T2, and T2 Plus processors. On paper it looked great, because the hardware is easy to manage and energy efficient. But, when he thought about the cost, it looked expensive. Then Summers learned about the Sun Startup Essentials Program. It gives new businesses like ONEIS, a helping hand by offering the latest Sun systems at significantly discounted prices compared with list prices. More than that, it gives members a great level of support.

Suddenly, the idea of rolling out CoolThreads hardware in the future was very much a reality. “It looked like the Sun Startup Essentials program was designed with ONEIS in mind,” comments Summers. “Apart from the great discounts on Sun technology and the fact Solaris makes the software transition across platforms easy, we have a Sun account manager who gives us the confidence that whatever Sun equipment we order will be with us fast — a must for any new business.”

By June 2008, with beta testing coming to an end, ONEIS was preparing for its official launch in September. The first customers were already in place and Smith was looking forward to the formal unveiling. Comments Smith, “Our core aim has always been to help small companies. If we can help our clients as much as Sun is helping us, we should be fine.”

 
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