Internet Brands, Inc.

Online Merchant Handles 20 Times More Users By Moving To The Solaris 10 Operating System

Internet Brands is a leading operator of e-commerce and niche community Web sites in categories spanning automotive, travel and leisure, and home. With a flexible and scalable platform, Internet Brands operates a rapidly growing network of more than 45 major Web sites offering consumers the ability to purchase products, share information through online communities, and make informed purchasing decisions. The company's Web sites and communities are often leaders in their categories and have received various best-in-class awards. Internet Brands was founded in 1998 as CarsDirect.com and added the parent company name of Internet Brands in June 2005.

Business Issues

Standardize on an operating system that is backed by enterprise technical support
Increase system performance while consolidating servers
Reduce IT overhead
Automate monitoring of services

Solution

Migrate Internet Brands Web sites, including CarsDirect.com from Linux to the Solaris 10 Operating System. Reprovision existing installed base of Dell's Intel processor-based servers.

Business Results

Exceptional enterprise technical support provided by Sun
20 times the number of concurrent users handled by the same hardware using Solaris 10
20 servers eliminated through virtualization using Solaris 10 Containers, reducing hardware, labor, power and cooling costs
Instantaneous creation of file systems utilizing Solaris 10
Solid platform support in Solaris 10 for Dell's x86 servers results in easy implementation
Automated monitoring of services through Solaris 10 Predictive Self Healing

Products/Services/Solutions

Success at a Glance

Internet Brands, Inc. is a leading provider of media and e-commerce sites focused on consumer purchases and niche online communities in categories such as cars, real estate, mortgages and travel. The company owns more than 45 Web-based businesses, all of which share the services of its main data center in El Segundo, California.

One of the company's flagship brands, CarsDirect.com, offers a huge selection of new and used cars from Fords to Ferraris. It's designed to help match car buyers with the cars of their dreams.

“ My IT staff members are experts in their field. So, when they call vendors for technical support, it's critical, and not something on which we can wait a day. We wanted a vendor that we could rely on for expert OS support. That’s why we went with Sun. ”

— Debra Domeyer, CTO, Internet Brands

Internet Brands Web sites have historically run a wide range of hardware, along with operating systems that include The Solaris Operating System and Linux distributions from Red Hat and SUSE. CarsDirect.com found that they could gain efficiency by migrating all operating systems from Linux to Solaris 10 on the x86 platform, with other Internet Brands companies quickly following suit. Solaris offered CarsDirect the ability to save administrative time and money, promote flexibility and gain unmatched technical support.

One of the key criteria for CarsDirect in choosing an operating system was ensuring that its vendor could provide enterprise-level technical support. This narrowed its selection to Sun Solaris OS and Red Hat. “We needed support that would ensure stability. My experience with Sun's support has always been excellent, so it was really a no-brainer to go with Solaris,” says Debra Domeyer, CTO, Internet Brands.

The rich features in the Solaris 10 Operating System have enabled Domeyer and her IT team to streamline the move from development to production, saving them time and money. “By virtualizing servers within Solaris 10 Containers, we have been able to retire 20 systems running QA, development and staging environments,” says Domeyer. “Retiring these systems has allowed us to reduce hardware, software, power and cooling costs in our data center.”

Additionally, Domeyer's team is using the Zettabyte File System (ZFS) in Solaris 10 to simplify the management of their file systems, gain flexibility and reduce costs. “ZFS enables us to shrink and increase volumes at will without bringing down the system,” says Domeyer. “With the file systems we were using before, it took a half hour to create a file system on a hard drive. With ZFS, reformatting is almost instantaneous. It's amazing.”

The CarsDirect team uses the Predictive Self Healing feature of Solaris 10 to automatically monitor a number of Web services that were previously monitored manually. “Now we have Solaris watch them and restart them if they fail,” Domeyer says. “If a service goes down, Service Management Framework brings it back up automatically without having to manually monitor the processes. That's very useful.”

While implementing Solaris, CarsDirect ran a test that showed it could handle 20 times the number of concurrent users as before with no additional servers. CarsDirect notes that this success is 100 percent attributable to Solaris 10. “I think our customers note that our Web sites are a lot faster than before,” Domeyer says.

Most importantly, all of Internet Brands’s operating companies now have the confidence that Solaris 10 and Sun's technical support will ensure customer service availability and a positive online experience.