StockCharts.com
Stock Research Firm Provides Investment Information Faster, Manages Infrastructure More Easily with Sun Blade Modular SystemStockCharts.com provides stock market investors with the information they need most: historical and real-time stock information in the form of customized charts produced on the fly to reflect up-to-the minute market conditions. Serving more than 18,000 clients, StockCharts.com regularly creates 4 to 5 million charts per day and more when the market spikes. Customer Challenges
SolutionLooking to reduce complexity while increasing processing speed, StockCharts.com’s IT team migrated its Java-based chart creation application to the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System with AMD Opteron processors. Business Results
Story DetailsAt StockCharts.com, online investors can see the dynamic interplay between markets, sectors and stocks. This highly regarded independent Web site focuses solely on charts and associated commentary. Its interactive charting tools help users become informed investors. Demands on StockChart.com's IT infrastructure fluctuate depending on hour-by-hour developments in the market. At any point, something interesting can cause many people, either subscribers or non-subscribers, to visit the site and generate charts. So the company must be prepared to handle traffic spikes and manage unpredictable volume.
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Our chart application is highly CPU- intensive. Our Sun Blade Server 8000 platform is a hands-down winner over our previous environment. It delivers more CPU power with fewer computers to configure and maintain, plus 'swappable' hard drives. The choice was a no-brainer.
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— Chip Anderson, President, StockCharts.com
In recent years the IT team deployed two chassis of IBM blade servers to scale up its capacity, but discovered that “they ate a lot of power and required a lot of cooling, so we had to do a data center upgrade,” says Chip Anderson, president of StockCharts.com. The company’s key applications were on the Java platform. As the IT team surveyed available technology, they were drawn to a proposal for the Sun Blade Server 8000 platform with Sun Blade 8000 P chassis from Sun and Applied Computer Solutions (ACS), a Sun Advantage Partner. They tested Sun Blades against their IBM solution. “Basically, we were looking not only at the speed of generating one chart but also how much load each server could take. We wanted to see what happened to chart generation time as the load increased. We saw the IBM blades degrade significantly after about 30 threads or 30 simulated users and the Sun blades were fine with a similar load of about 75 threads or 75 users.” Today, StockChart.com generates all charts on ten Sun Blades, getting more than double the processing volume and speed of the 28 IBM blades that they replaced. StockCharts.com purchased 20 Sun Blades in all and is now putting the rest into production. “Taking care of 10 blades instead of 28 means a lot less administration time,” Anderson says. The Sun Blades also have removable drives which can be hot-swapped, improving uptime and helping to ensure the 24/7 availability that subscribers expect. The IBM blades lacked this feature. With its new Sun Blade 8000 Modular System in place, StockCharts.com is delivering faster charting capabilities. “We have 18,000 subscribers, and our growth rate continues unabated,” Anderson says. “All of our charts are being generated by Sun blades. We got our last IBM blade out of the pool about a month ago.” |
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