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With more than 4,000 customers, including BMW and the French Ministry of Justice, France’s Planet-Work has been a leading player in the European Web-hosting business since 1999. Over the years, it has successfully evolved its business model to cope with the changing requirements of its customers, based on the latest datacenter technology. This has enabled it to respond quickly to changes in the competitive landscape while providing cost-effective services to customers of all sizes.

The company’s technology strategy focuses on robust open-source software. This led it to deploy a hosting service based on the GNU/Linux Debian operating system along with Apache HTTP Server software, the MySQL Community Edition database, and the PHP development environment. Although the technology was reliable, the company found that adding capacity to the platform became increasingly expensive as customer demand rose.

Frédéric Vannière, technology director at Planet-Work, explains, “We rent space from two Internet-hosting providers, and our main costs are determined by our hardware footprint and our overall energy consumption.” By the start of 2008, these costs were starting to jeopardize the company’s margins and had begun exploring alternatives. “We had two clear goals: to reduce our energy consumption by every means possible, while at the same time offering a more flexible service to customers.”

Vannière and his team decided to participate in the Sun Startup Essentials program, which offers a variety of resources including free technical support, access to online resources, information systems at discounted prices or on loan, and access to Sun’s testing environment. The Planet-Work team was particularly impressed by a virtualized cloud-computing environment proposed by Sun. “This was the answer that we were looking for,” says Vannière. “The Sun solution combined high-performance technology and low cost.” Even though cloud computing is a relatively new concept in the world of Web hosting, Vannière was convinced that Sun would be able to deliver the energy savings and flexibility that would enable Planet-Work to outperform the competition.

The new virtualized environment centers on Sun Fire X4170 servers running the Sun Solaris 10 Operating System, Solaris Containers technology, and Sun xVM Server as the hypervisor software. This configuration offers capacity for 120 virtual servers, each with 100 GB of disc space. In addition, Sun’s highly scalable Solaris ZFS file system provides flexible and scalable data management. Load balancing is provided by HAProxy software running on Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers. Vannière chose xVM/Containers over over the competition because of their increased capacity. Vannière says: “The xVM/Containers deliver more virtual machines per host thanks to 64bit paravirtualized guests, but without the additional costs of licensing or additional management hardware."

Sun's storage also plays a critical role in the solution. A Sun Storage 7410 cluster located in each of two datacenters offers 16 TB of hybrid storage (coupling solid-state drive storage with traditional SATA disks), and capacity for up to 44 TB of storage and backup. This is replicated to an Open Storage SAN built on OpenSolaris. What’s more, the Sun Storage 7410 is an Open Storage system, which means that Sun doesn’t charge Planet-Work additional license fees for protocols and data services. In addition, thanks to the Dtrace Analytics provided by the Sun Storage 7000, Planet-Work is able to identify performance issues, and then work with customers to either lower disk input/output volumes or isolate customer applications on a faster disk.

When it comes to energy savings, the figures speak for themselves. The virtualized cloud-computing environment requires only 6,000 watts, one-third of the energy required to power the equivalent number of physical servers with the same memory and data-backup support. “Thanks to Sun virtualization technology we can manage our costs and pass on these savings to our clients,” says Vannière. “The money saved by using less energy is spent on increasing availability with replication and redundant hardware. In one stroke, we have dramatically increased the competitiveness of our business.”

The virtualized environment also helps Planet-Work deliver a more agile and responsive service to customers. The cloud-computing model is especially attractive for small or medium-sized businesses that may experience a sudden surge in Web site visitors based on an event or new product release, for example. “It means that we can provide the equivalent of a pay-as-you-go service so that businesses can manage spikes in activity without having to make long-term payments or large increments of memory and server power,” says Vannière.

Additionally, Sun virtualization enables the business to add extra capacity at lightning speed. “We can now set up a logical server in about 15 minutes. That’s practically nothing when you compare this with the time required for order, delivery, and configuration of a new physical server,” says Vannière.

What’s more, customers either can continue to use Planet-Work’s well-established Linux setup or instead can take advantage of the new Java-based development environment and alternative technologies such as Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server. “By offering more than one development environment, we can widen our appeal and increase our competitiveness,” says Vannière.

By 2012, Vannière expects that most of Planet-Work’s clients will be using the virtualized environment. “Our early experiences of virtualization in the hosting center have been extremely positive.” He also emphasizes the importance of Sun Startup Essentials. “This program gave us the momentum we needed to move forward while minimizing the risk associated with the deployment of leading-edge technology. We now have a software roadmap that underpins growth and controls costs at the same time.”

 
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