Siteworx, Inc.

Success at a Glance

Cited as one of the fastest growing private companies in the United States, Siteworx, an “Interactive Design, User Experience and Application Development” company faced the challenge of expanding rapidly without compromising the quality of service it delivers to its prestigious clientele — a group that includes AOL, U.S. News and World Report, Coldwell Banker Commercial, Accenture, and AARP. Siteworx wanted to upgrade its technology and streamline processes in order to control costs at two facilities — a production center in upstate New York and a creative and production hub in Reston, Virginia that houses about 80 employees serving an estimated 30 active accounts at any point in time.

After evaluating the competition, including the Dell servers they were then using, Siteworx President Tim McLaughlin cited that investing in a fleet of Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers was “a no brainer.” The Sun Fire X2200 M2 server system addressed all of the company’s requirements — it's fast, stable, energy efficient and runs virtually any operating system. “The technology is simply better and the price was right,” McLaughlin says.

Siteworx and its subsidiary, Axiom®, an enterprise software development company, traditionally developed in Java and delivered their work on the client’s operating system of choice. They were considering standardizing on Red Hat Linux when the server upgrade led them to try the Solaris 10 Operating System for the first time.

The company liked what it saw and switched. Since then, Siteworx has maintained an uptime of 100 percent on servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. Implementing the ZFS file system feature of the Solaris 10 OS has improved disk allocation management and freed up administrative time. For example, upgrading individual systems is 90 percent faster with global upgrades and setting up new environments is 83 percent faster. Using DTrace, the dynamic tracing technology in the Solaris 10 OS, Siteworx has been able to rapidly discover, diagnose and repair flaws and bottlenecks in running code — an important capability for a company that designs and architects highly interactive, high-traffic Web properties.

Most dramatic in meeting the Siteworx goal of reducing the total cost of ownership was the virtualization capability Solaris 10 OS offers. By implementing Solaris Containers to separate and protect client applications in a virtualized environment, Siteworx was able to revolutionize its use of server space. “Using Containers, we have been able to pack a lot more on a box,” states McLaughlin. “We estimate that Solaris Containers have been able to give us the equivalent memory and processing power of ten virtual servers on every physical server. That’s resulted in an 80% reduction in space requirements and 65% savings in energy costs,” says Brad Forrester, Siteworx Systems Operations Manager.

In parallel to the stability, maturity and broad feature set that Siteworx appreciates in the Solaris 10 Operating System, it uses the Java Platform Standard Edition (SE) 6 as a programming language. McLaughlin applauds the huge library of APIs available to Java developers, its portability and ease of interfacing with other programming languages. Additionally, Siteworx benefits from the merger of Java and Java script in version 6.0, the huge international developer community, the JMX debugger and most of all, how well Java scales to a multi-processor or multi-core environment. All of these features help Siteworx and Axiom achieve the combination of stability and agility needed for success in their highly competitive, highly creative business space.