TravelMuse

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Although most online travel companies only help people book reservations, TravelMuse provides end-to-end tools for planning vacations, including where to go, what to do, where to stay, and where to eat. Site visitors can also book reservations and use collaboration tools to make plans with others. In 2007, TravelMuse founders wanted to bring their innovative idea to market quickly. To do so required a high-performance IT architecture that was highly available but also affordable and flexible. The solution also needed to support rapid growth, interact with third-party services, and support content in multiple formats, including in-house publications, open-source geographical data, and licensed travel information.

Given its requirements, TravelMuse wanted to use open-source software that was supported by a third party. "Even though we wanted to save on our licensing costs as much as possible, it was also important to us to have commercial support," says Cyril Bouteille, vice president of engineering at TravelMuse. In 2007, the company decided to build its architecture with Sun technologies, which initially included Sun servers, the Solaris 10 Operating System, GlassFish Enterprise Server Version 2, MySQL 5.0 Community Server, and Java EE 5. Employees had a positive history working with Sun solutions, and by using products from a single vendor, TravelMuse could simplify IT administration and take advantage of synergies that exist between Sun products. Commenting on its choice of Sun software Bouteille says, "GlassFish Enterprise Server has consistently been ahead of the competition in terms of Java EE 5 compliance. I also feel that the GlassFish architecture is superb overall. In addition, MySQL is pretty much the brand name for a versatile open-source database, so our choice to use it was a no-brainer."

TravelMuse engaged NaviSite to host its hardware architecture. The company set up five virtual servers with Solaris Containers - the built-in virtualization technology in the Solaris 10 OS - on a Sun Blade 8000 Modular System with Sun Blade X8400 server modules. Next, two employees from TravelMuse deployed the company's software infrastructure. GlassFish Enterprise Server, backed by standard support, delivers applications including the Alfresco Enterprise Content Management software and Jive Social Business Software. Apache Web Server manages Web traffic and MySQL stores all transactional and user-generated content. To help provide for high availability, TravelMuse engaged a third-party database administrator (DBA) to support their database operations.

TravelMuse went live in 2008, and to the founders' knowledge, the site was the first to offer its blend of travel services. Recently, TravelMuse decided to switch database support vendors and upgraded to MySQL Enterprise Platinum Edition, which includes support services from Sun. "We were paying about $2,500 per month for our database support," explains Bouteille. "By switching to MySQL Platinum, we pay about one-third of what we paid before for DBA support."

With its solution, TravelMuse has minimized its costs in other ways as well. Bouteille estimates that the company saves around $200,000 in licensing costs each year by using open-source software and reduces its hosting expenses by 50% with Solaris Containers. Developers can also be more productive with Java EE 5. "Rather than maintaining different versions of the same user interface widget on multiple Web pages, we can define that module in one place and reuse it on numerous pages seamlessly," Bouteille notes.

The infrastructure at TravelMuse has maintained 99.9% availability while growing fivefold over the last six months. "The Solaris 10 OS and GlassFish Enterprise Server are very stable systems that basically don't go down," says Bouteille. "If any issue does occur, the Solaris 10 OS provides more troubleshooting tools than its competitors - tools like DTrace, pstack, and prstat."