The Real Time Matrix Corporation

Story Details

Streaming real-time, Web-based information is an increasingly popular marketing tool. Forward-thinking organizations, such as Major League Soccer, deliver live news feeds and video clips 24x7 to fans. How do they do it? Enter Real Time Matrix Corporation (RTM)—an Oakland, California-based startup.

RTM has a different approach to Web search. As a matching company, it sifts through a sea of live data, such as Internet blogs and news feeds to find information matching a customer’s keywords. It feeds relevant content to customers in two Web formats it calls Personal Channels (RSS feeds) and Vortex™, a portable and highly customizable publishing platform. “The company processes two million articles a day,” CEO Jeff Whitehead says.

RTM’s challenge came when they implemented their innovative, patent-pending matching technology. The company needed to prove that it could test millions of preferences against millions of feeds in real time. But its existing equipment wasn’t up to the task.

The company chose Sun Fire T1000 and Sun Fire T2000 servers running CoolThreads technology. Offering high performance on throughput-intensive applications, the eco-responsible Sun Fire servers require less power and space, as well. And with the Sun Try and Buy program, RTM had the option to test-drive the servers for up to 60 days.

RTM also qualified for participation in the Sun Startup Essentials program. This offers discounted pricing on Sun solutions to help young companies lower their cost of entry. “Sun Startup Essentials enabled us to buy the latest Sun equipment cost-effectively—and since the servers could run Linux, there was no question about joining the program and getting started,” Whitehead recalls.

The initial plan was to run Ubuntu Linux. Soon RTM decided instead to port its code to the Solaris 10 Operating System, which was pre-installed and well-regarded. “The migration process turned out to be really quite easy,” he states. The new Sun installation interfaced well with the Linux servers the company already had. The kicker was performance. “The performance improvement was staggering,” Whitehead says. “We immediately went from a couple of hundred to 10,000 matches per second per thread throughput.”

RTM engaged Trignos, a Fremont, California-based company to re-architect the data acquisition and rebroadcasting infrastructure that feeds RTM’s matching engine. “I think the Sun Fire T2000 is a technology marvel. In just two rack units of space, I can host multiple virtual servers, and allocate and manage resources dynamically.” Trignos CTO Lalit Singh says.

Scalability was also a priority. Each new provider of data feeds radically increased the draw on system resources. Buying inexpensive Linux servers seemed like a reasonable way to grow, until RTM factored in the cost of deploying and maintaining them. Whitehead estimates that RTM would have had to buy about two dozen Linux servers, at $3,000 each, to do the work of the Sun Fire T2000. Not counting the cost of loading, testing and hosting the stand-alone Linux servers, RTM still saves about 50 cents on the dollar—saving RTM about 80 percent on the power and rack space bill.

“Sun servers give us so much processing power with so little power consumption. A full rack with max space, power and dedicated support can run as high as $5,000 per month. Before, we were projecting twice that amount,” Whitehead says.

RTM has seen stability gains too. The company expected that some of its new code might cause system failures, but the Solaris 10 OS has repeatedly stopped offending programs and issued warnings before any damage was done. “Solaris is an extremely robust operating system,” Whitehead says. “We just bought a Solaris workstation for writing new code.” RTM expects to develop and deploy applications up to 10 times faster using the new workstation.

Whitehead concludes, “We plan to expand by offering our content-delivery applications on mobile devices such as PDAs and cell phones. We never would have gotten here so fast without a platform like the Sun Fire T2000.”