PlanetOut Inc.
Major Media Company Saves Power Costs and Space While Improving Performance with Sun Fire T1000 ServersPlanetOut Inc. is the leading global media and entertainment company exclusively serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. PlanetOut's digital media brands include Gay.com, PlanetOut.com, Advocate.com, Out.com, OutTraveler.com and HIVPlusMag.com, as well as localized versions of the Gay.com site in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. PlanetOut print media brands, published by LPI, include The Advocate, Out, The Out Traveler and HIVPlus, as well as SpecPub, Inc. titles. Transaction services brands include e-commerce Web sites Kleptomaniac.com and BuyGay.com, travel and events marketer RSVP Vacations, and book publisher Alyson Publications, among others. PlanetOut, based in San Francisco with additional offices in New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, London and Buenos Aires, offers Global 1000 and local advertiser's access to what it believes to be the most extensive multi-channel, multi-platform network of gay and lesbian people in the world.Customer Challenges
SolutionPlanetOut consolidated its Web and application tiers using Sun Fire T1000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. The Containers feature of the Solaris 10 Operating System enables each server to handle the workload of up to 10 older machines. Business Results
Story DetailsFor more than 10 years, PlanetOut has been growing its Web presence, its portfolio of media brands and its following among the LGBT market. In 2004, Nielsen NetRatings ranked Gay.com—one of PlanetOut’s most successful properties—second in terms of average time online. Approximately 5.4 million unique users visit PlanetOut’s network of Web sites each month. However, that continued growth was at risk because of infrastructure limitations. For example, the application servers hosting chat rooms had to be restarted nightly, throwing off 10,000 users. The Web servers were unreliable due to memory leaks, so visitors to PlanetOut.com were experiencing delays and “page not found” errors, as many as 3,000 times per day. With approximately 400 aging servers, PlanetOut was out of space in its hosted data center.
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Sun has hit a home run with the combination of Solaris 10 running on the UltraSPARC T1-based servers. The T1000 has no competition at this time, and what Sun has done makes other new servers seem outdated.
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— Tom Cignarella, Vice President of Technical Operations, PlanetOut Inc.
Newly hired Tom Cignarella, Vice President of technical operations, had to turn the situation around. PlanetOut had obtained a Sun Fire T1000 server for testing through the Try and Buy Program. The T1000 server could handle huge workloads without reaching capacity. In further testing, the team discovered that it could use the Container feature of Solaris 10 OS to create 10 zones in each server. Each zone could do the workload of one of the current Sun Fire V100 servers. “When we realized that we could replace 10 servers with a single T1000, the math started to really hit us that this could be a really huge win for us,” says Cignarella. Based on the testing, PlanetOut choose the Sun Fire T1000 and Solaris 10 Operating System as the platform for its infrastructure refresh. In the first phase, PlanetOut replaced 250 older systems with 20 Sun Fire T1000 servers with 6-core UltraSPARC T1 processors based on the CoolThreads technology. When the project is finished, PlanetOut will have replaced a total of 400 Sun Fire V100 and other servers with 70 Sun Fire T1000 servers. The team also plans to evaluate ZFS as a replacement for Veritas Storage Foundation, and the DTrace feature of Solaris 10 to troubleshoot the operating system. The Sun Fire T1000 machines save more than 50 percent in server footprint, enabling a possible move to a smaller data center with lower costs. And faster application performance with no service interruptions is making the PlanetOut community much happier. Justifying the purchase proved to be an easy process. The consolidation project will pay for itself in 1.5 years, according to PlanetOut’s analysis. “We greatly reduced our power consumption,” says Cignarella. “And we have made the product more reliable and more scalable than it was without making any code changes. It’s an extremely successful solution.” |
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