SuccessFactors

SuccessFactors knows what drives business success. Since 2001, its advanced Performance & Talent Management solutions have helped companies worldwide achieve their goals. SuccessFactors on-demand applications cover everything from recruiting to performance, compensation, succession, and everything in between. As it has helped its customers, SuccessFactors has also achieved more. In 2007, for example, it added 900 new customers to double its customer base to 1,750 with more than three million users.

SuccessFactors operates three datacenters, one in the U.S. and two in The Netherlands, to support its clients. A Sun customer since its founding, the company relies heavily on Sun hardware, including Sun Fire T1000 servers, Sun Fire T2000 servers, Sun Fire E2900, as well as Sun SPARC Enterprise M50000 servers, which run the Solaris 10 Operating System. The company's Oracle databases (Oracle 10g Release2) reside on the Sun Fire E2900 and SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers. The largest database is 2.5TB.

To provide its Web-based employee management and performance applications to its clients, SuccessFactors relies on the Redhat JBOSS Web framework on a Sun Fire X4100 server and Apache Web server software that runs on a Sun Fire T1000 server. The X4100 uses the Solaris 10 Operating System.

With its rapidly escalating growth, SuccessFactors began to consider upgrading its infrastructure in 2007. “We were looking for scalability, but we also needed to be very considerate of costs,” says Jeremy Bauer, vice president of information technology at SuccessFactors. “We want to keep the costs of goods down for our clients so we can offer them a low subscription price.”

The Sun Solution Center worked with the SuccessFactors' operations team to architect the optimal solution for the servers' workload. SuccessFactors chose the Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 server with four dual-core 2.15 GHz SPARC64 VI processors as the replacement for its Sun Fire V880s. The SPARC Enterprise M5000 offers mainframe-class virtualization capabilities that enable companies to run up to 24 hardware partitions on a single server. SuccessFactors took advantage of the Sun Upgrade Advantage Program, which customers can use to save up to 15 percent when they trade in older servers.

The deployment provided an efficient implementation. The IT professionals who deployed the new servers configured the Solaris 10 kernel parameters to optimize performance of SuccessFactors' Oracle databases. “Our biggest challenge was to maximize our compute power while achieving the smallest environmental footprint,” notes Bauer. “One reason we went with a Sun Fire architecture is its low space and power requirements.”

Bauer says the company saw immediate improvements “right out of the gate” when it went live with its new server infrastructure, including lower energy costs and improved server utilization. The company was now able to share more power circuits instead of having to buy more as they added capacity. The power savings came in most with the Sun Fire X4100 servers. The company is also now prepared for future growth with its ability to quickly scale up its architecture.

Currently, SuccessFactors is using many of the Solaris 10 features, including DTrace, which Bauer calls a “very good solid diagnostic tool.” The company is also using Solaris Containers for server virtualization in its development environment and expects to put them to use in the production environment to scale up with growth.

Its Sun infrastructure plays a key role in helping SuccessFactors deliver strong solutions. “I think that using the Sun product lines has absolutely put me in the position to stay ahead of my capacity planning needs and ensure that I’m giving my customers the best experience possible,” says Bauer.