Sina

Success at a Glance

As one of the largest Web portals in China, Sina hosts a series of online events including the China Shenzhou 6 Spacecraft Launch special report, attracting hundreds of millions users and increasing the daily volume of access to several times the normal rate. Sina needed to upgrade its servers to increase the scalability of its infrastructure to accommodate these peak service periods, and to reduce maintenance costs, power consumption, and floor space. “The online service business is increasing and Sina is committed to improving customer service and cutting down operational cost,” says Li Songbo, Chief Technology Officer for Sina.

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers are an extremely important infrastructure component for network applications, indispensable for building a scalable system for user access control, identification retrieval, database access, and network security. As Sina planned to build new services to add more users, the company needed to upgrade the capacity and performance of its LDAP servers. After rigorous testing, Sina decided to replace its 30 Dell 1850 servers running Linux with 12 Sun Fire T1000 servers running Solaris 10 and the Sun Java System Directory Server. “Through comprehensive and stringent testing and evaluation, we recognized that Sun solutions can enhance service expendability and improve customer experience as well as cut down on the IT investment’s total cost,” says Li Songbo.

Sun’s new Cool Tools for Web Tier optimization resources were used to automate tuning and optimization, enabling Sina to utilize all the performance advantages of Sun’s LDAP software and CoolThreads technology. In addition, when testing the Sun Fire T1000 servers against the Dell 1850 servers, Sina used the SwaP metric which computes the amount of performance each server can deliver in a fixed power and space envelope, revealing true system efficiency. The Sun Fire T1000 server won by delivering much higher levels of performance with much lower space and power consumption.

Sina was particularly attracted to the Sun Fire CoolThreads technology that delivers breakthrough performance with dramatic space and power efficiency. The Sun Fire T1000 server conforms to the industry’s “Green Computing” (IEEE 1680) standard, and its UltraSPARC T1 processors set a new industry benchmark in system performance and power and space consumption.

As a result of switching to Sun, Sina not only improved the overall quality of customer service by increasing performance fivefold, but also reduced management and maintenance costs, reduced the server footprint to one-fourth the space, and lowered power consumption to one-seventh the rate. Due to the scalability and reliability of the Sun Fire T1000 server matched with the performance and security features of the Solaris 10 Operating System, Sina’s new LDAP platform supports hundreds of millions of users securely, scales to provide better service at peak periods, and enables system expansion to accommodate future Internet applications.