SmugMug

Story Details

Don MacAskill and his father formed SmugMug five years ago, because they weren’t satisfied with the quality of online photo-sharing sites. Though the pair didn’t have much money, they knew they wanted to run their own site. “We wanted our photos to be big and beautiful, high resolution, not surrounded by ads,” says MacAskill, the firm’s CEO and “chief geek.” “And we didn’t want our friends and family to have to enter their email addresses to see and share photos.”

SmugMug is now a growing fee-based online photo- and video-sharing site with 30-plus employees and a new office in Mountain View, California. And even though it’s a relatively small operation, SmugMug is increasingly reliant on technology. “We have to be fast, above and beyond everything else, because customers get frustrated if the site is slow,” MacAskill says. Reliability is equally critical. “Obviously, we can’t afford to lose data, because it could be somebody’s priceless wedding photos,” he says.

To support the site, SmugMug had been using servers from Bay Area company Rackable, because they were “cheap and reasonably fast,” according to MacAskill. However, SmugMug experienced fairly frequent server downtime. “Even a few seconds or minutes of downtime causes us pain, because it’s causing our customers a lot of pain,” remarks MacAskill. Then, approximately eight months ago, SmugMug was faced with a major technical challenge. “One day, we got a shipment of equipment from Rackable that didn’t work,” MacAskill says. “We had a hard time getting the company to even acknowledge the problem, let alone fix it. It really damaged us and our ability to serve our customers.”

SmugMug asked Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun Microsystems to propose server solutions. Almost immediately, Sun representatives drove to MacAskill’s home to meet with him. In addition to being impressed with such a fast, personal response, MacAskill soon realized Sun was the only company that actually had an affordable server solution that provided SmugMug with enough memory to support its business— the Sun Fire X2200 M2 server.

“We needed 32 gigabytes of RAM that was reasonably cheap,” says MacAskill. “We didn’t need a lot of CPU. However, all of the offerings from Sun’s competitors were around four CPU, which added dramatically to the price and complexity.”

Because the Sun Fire X2200 M2 server can scale RAM up or down based on need, SmugMug could use it on its Web servers and rendering boxes instead of just the database. “That is a big win for us, because we get to standardize on a single component,” MacAskill says. Ultimately, SmugMug chose the Sun Fire X2200 M2 server for its reliability and speed. “Our customers love fast and hate slow. It’s that simple,” he adds. “So the more RAM we can put in our boxes, the faster the site runs and the happier the customers are.”

As pleased as he is with the technology, MacAskill says Sun's commitment as a partner was the deciding factor. For example, SmugMug had recently participated in Sun’s “Try and Buy” program for the Sun Fire T1000 server with the Sun UltraSPARC T1 processor, an experience that gave MacAskill a strong initial impression of Sun. “Sun offered the product for free to anybody who would try it and write a review of it,” MacAskill says. “We tried it and got to do some neat things with it. Although it wasn’t the right solution for us, Sun let us keep the machine, true to their word.”

According to MacAskill, that level of trust formed the basis of a committed partner relationship that continues today. “Unlike some of the other server vendors we’ve talked to, Sun actually connects the dots and let's us talk to the engineers writing the software or designing the hardware platforms,” he says. It’s a way of doing business that aligns perfectly with SmugMug’s own modus operandi. “We built this site to share our own photos, so, unconsciously, the customer has always been at the center of our offering,” MacAskill says. “It’s really nice to have found a company like Sun that is making an effort to listen to its customers.” He adds that the company's partnership with Sun will likely lead SmugMug to purchase more Sun products in the future.