Sun Entry-Level Servers: Success Story - Bridges.com

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Career Planning Goes Back to School

"Bridges chose Sun early on because of the robust Solaris Operating Environment and the stable, high-performance reputation of the servers. Moving to the Sun Enterprise 450 server, the company gained tremendous price/performance and scalability to accommodate the projected growth of its Web-based services."

Bridges.com

In 1994, two Canadian high school career counselors left their jobs to develop a breakthrough, Web-based information service. They hired journalists to research the labor market and write career profiles in an easy-to-read magazine style that students would find enjoyable. This information was made available to subscribers and guests over the World Wide Web. After a year of development, they launched Career Explorer (CX) (www.careerexplorer.com), which began serving up a comprehensive library of career-related articles, packaged as a daily magazine. CX also delivers independently researched job profiles, labor market analysis, and career development tools via the Internet and CD-ROM.

Today, Bridges' online and CD-ROM based services have more than 15,300 subscribers, and command 40 percent of North America's high school market. Much of Bridges' Web-based content is delivered on an infrastructure of Sun Enterprise 450 workgroup servers from Sun Microsystems, Inc. running the CX system on an application server with an Oracle database.

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Virtual Lockers

The original site was launched on one of Sun's SPARCstation 5 servers, offering HTML content, which was refreshed nightly, for CX version 1. The second generation of CX has expanded capabilities. It enables students to store information (such as resumes, notes, bookmarks) in virtual lockers. It also allows for the custom set-up of another layer of navigational tabs, letting individual users or school districts customize the system to make it most useful.

Bridges tested a development version of CX running Windows NT, but discovered that Sun offered more CPU per dollar. In looking at the Windows NT servers, staff reported about a 50 percent boost in processing power for each additional CPU added. The Sun Enterprise 450 servers produced 85 percent more processing power per CPU.

Users adding or otherwise modifying their Portfolio Plus information in CX send data through the Internet to the Sun Enterprise 450 server, containing the CX application and Oracle database. The changed HTML templates are sent back with the corrected or requested information. Bridges' CX applications reside in an application server architecture that is highly scalable, secure, and open standards-based. Bridges found that the Sun architecture matches those features excellently.

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A Bigger Boost From Sun

Bridges installed three Sun Enterprise 450 workgroup servers that can scale to four gigabytes of RAM. One of the servers is responsible for the Web pages at careerexplorer.com, a second runs the Oracle database, and the third is used for new development. In three years, Bridges' static career content evolved, becoming much more dynamic and interactive. The Sun Enterprise 450 workgroup server is credited with helping the company move seamlessly to a more sophisticated architecture, addressing higher volumes of users.

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