Primus Canada

Story Details

Not long ago, the toughest choices for home phone systems were limited to touch-tone or pulse dialing, or whether the new tomato-red phone would match the wallpaper. The Internet changed all that. In 2004, Primus became the first company to offer Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service in Canada, providing inexpensive Internet-based phone calls. Primus remains a leading Canadian provider of residential VoIP. In fact, with its customer base growing so rapidly, the company found demand exceeding the capacity of its Sun Fire V210 servers.

The Primus Service Platform Engineering team, led by manager Paul Monaghan, determined that buying bigger machines was not an ideal option. Instead,the Primus team turned to Sun Microsystems and its Sun Fire T2000 servers with UltraSPARC T1 processors to address the capacity issues.

Primus Chooses Sun’s Try and Buy Program
Primus took advantage of Sun’s Try and Buy Program to test the Sun Fire T2000 server and the Solaris 10 Operating System free for 60 days, so it could see if the solution worked. “Making a strategic platform decision like this is significant, and we couldn’t afford to get it wrong,” said Monaghan.

Built to deliver high-demand Web and transaction services, the Sun Fire T2000 server is equipped with CoolThreads technology, which offers the highest levels of throughput in the lowest space and power envelope. Virtualization and partitioning are accomplished in the Sun Fire T2000s through Logical Domains (LDoms) in Solaris 10. LDoms allow users to run up to 32 operating systems simultaneously on a single CoolThreads server.

Primus set up a proof of concept. The team placed the new Sun system into production for a week, using the VoIP application software on a two-core LDom running Solaris 10. “The application went from 50 percent CPU utilization, down to 15 percent,” said Monaghan. “We were surprised to find the application using so little of only one core of this eight-core CPU.”

Virtually Innovative: Logical Domains deliver better control
Now that the solution is running in a full production environment, Primus is consolidating multiple platforms running VoIP onto virtual machines, which will all connect back to the company’s centralized storage system. Through the new Sun technology, the service platform engineering department at Primus has more CPU headroom to debug. It can also consolidate platforms and develop new VoIP solutions without affecting service to customers, which Primus sees as a competitive advantage. Primus also uses the system's virtualization capabilities for maintenance, avoiding the need to take down an entire box.

Monaghan also liked Sun's level of control. “Some vendors will include 16 CPUs in a server that all virtual machines must share. Sun technology, on the other hand, allows you to specifically assign the hardware to a virtual machine, and the application won’t use CPUs from other virtual machines,” he said.

More Space, Power, and Efficiency
The Sun Fire T2000 servers not only provide disaster recovery, floor space, and power savings, they also offer exceptional efficiency. “The ability to take what are possibly 16 to 24 servers and consolidate them to 4 is a huge management savings,” Monaghan emphasized. “The Sun technology is performing well beyond our expectations.”