Featured Customers
Jumpstart Your Startup
OutNowOutNow.ch is among the largest entertainment portals in Switzerland with up to nearly 500,000 visitors per month. The startup sees itself as the address for every information about movies, games and television in Switzerland, with a team of 30 freelancers preparing comprehensive content for all three channels on a daily basis. As an online publisher, IT is obviously a main key for OutNow, who relies on a high uptime and reliable performance for both their public website as well as the redaction/administrative backend services. Being a startup, monetary issues are also a main key and are handled as daily business. The Sun Startup Essentials program offers hardware that perfectly meets OutNow's requirements, both in regards to performance and budget restraints.
“Thanks to Sun's SSE Program and its very fair priced hardware options, we were able to boost the performance of our main website by a factor of two while adding stability and redundancy. With Sun and Acceleris, OutNow AG and OutNow.ch feel ready for a lot of future entertainment.”
— Thomas Hagi, CTO and Board Member, OutNow AG
SoundCloud
“Before, it was difficult to scale our storage. I had to use some NFS tricks to distribute where files were stored, which cluttered our Web application so that it became more difficult to maintain. With our Sun solution, we have a good strategy for scaling different application bottlenecks and are no longer limited by a fixed storage-pool size. We can grow our storage pool as required without having to worry about where the space is or how it will work.”
— Sean Treadway, Chief Architect, SoundCloud
TweetMeme
“TweetMeme is experiencing staggering growth. Thanks to MySQL Enterprise and the Sun Startup Essentials program, we know that we can scale to meet the demand of end users and customers.”
— Nick Halstead, Founder, TweetMeme
Outspark
“The Sun Startup Essentials program certainly saved us money, because we are paying on a monthly basis and did not have to come up with a lot of money up front for this solution. That was a major advantage to us as a startup company concerned with our bottom line.”
— Luc Suryo, Chief of Network and System Operations, Outspark
Merkl ITMunich-based systems vendor Merkl IT offers IT services, based on industry-standard software, primarily for small and medium-sized businesses. With the company's core product, Virtual BackOffice, businesses gain a virtual IT infrastructure that is highly scalable and available. As it moved ahead with Virtual BackOffice, Merkl IT needed hardware that would help it provide high resiliency and scalability and fast response times for its customers. Although it considered other products, the company chose to rely on the Sun Startup Essentials program and several Sun products for its solution. Now, Merkl IT customers get an affordable, scalable cloud-computing solution with high flexibility, and its employees can access their applications quickly and easily wherever they are.
“The Sun infrastructure allows us to operate the cloud-computing solution in an energy-efficient and stable manner, saving our customers money and helping the environment.”
— Julian Merkl, Cofounder and Managing Director, Merkl IT
Planet-Work
“The Sun Startup Essentials program gave us the momentum we needed to move forward while minimizing the risk associated with the deployment of leading-edge technology. We now have a software roadmap that underpins growth and controls costs at the same time.”
— Frédéric Vannière, Technology Director, Planet-Work
MusicMetric
“We didn't just go with Sun because of the great prices. The power usage of Dell servers was 60% higher than Sun's systems. Through the Sun Startup Essentials program, we were able to buy about 50% more hardware than we expected given our budget. Also, through Sun Startup Essentials we'd get great feedback and support from engineers on our architecture, and we'd be able to participate in events designed to help startups like ourselves.”
— Greg Mead, Head of Research and Development, MusicMetric
Motionbox
“Sun unified storage gives us the flexibility to tune and configure multiple instances of the same device for throughput or capacity or whatever our needs may be. It was the ideal solution for us. Thanks, too, to the Sun Startup Essentials program, where I got the opportunity to discuss in-depth with Sun engineers to validate the best storage architecture to meet our intense demands.”
— Chris Brown, VP Engineering, Motionbox
Scout Labs
SearchForce, Inc.
“Through the Sun Startup Essentials program, we migrated from Dell servers running Linux to an amazingly affordable Sun server and storage platform. This was not an instance of us going to Sun saying, 'Hey, can you help us out?' This was Sun saying, 'Hey, how can we help you?' The result was a huge success, and a very satisfied customer.”
— David Simon, Chairman, SearchForce, Inc.
BlueOrange Networks
“We needed high performance, but at budget prices - not things which usually go together with storage. But we got both from Sun with their Open Storage 7110 and the Startup Essentials Program.”
— Dr Jack Kreindler, Managing Director, BlueOrange Networks
OurStage, Inc.
“Since OpenSolaris is developed, tested, and supported by Sun, it provides us with enterprise level quality, performance and consistency that we need. With OpenSolaris, we don't need to worry about our environment; it just works.”
— David Pascoe, Vice President of Operations, OurStage
SmugMugSmugMug, headquartered in Mountain View, California, is a premium photo-sharing Web site where photographers can quickly and easily share their photos. To support the site, SmugMug had been using servers from Bay Area company Rackable, because they were "cheap and reasonably fast," according to CEO Don MacAskill. However, SmugMug experienced fairly frequent server downtime and subsequently asked Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun Microsystems to propose server solutions. Almost immediately, Sun representatives drove to MacAskill's home to meet with him. In addition to being impressed with such a fast, personal response, MacAskill soon realized Sun was the only company that actually had an affordable server solution that provided SmugMug with enough memory to support its business - the Sun Fire X2200 M2 server.
“Everything we do - every product feature we add and every optimization - comes from listening to our customers and trying to figure out what they're really trying to tell us. So it's refreshing to talk to a company like Sun that seems to be doing some of those same things. When I have a request or a complaint or a compliment, somebody at Sun is listening to me.”
— Don MacAskill, CEO and chief geek, SmugMug
Wikimedia Foundation
“We chose Sun Fire servers for their excellent price-performance ratio. The hybrid Sun Fire X4540 Storage Servers are very exciting because they offer a huge amount of storage and also deliver superior processor performance when we have a lot of read/write activity or a large number of uploads. Sun Startup Essentials provided the scalable storage solution we wanted at the price we were looking for.”
— Brion Vibber, Chief Technology Officer, Wikimedia Foundation
Conemis AG
“The selection of hardware and software can deliver a huge advantage. If we say that the solution designed by us is based on Sun systems, we gain considerably more trust than if we only offered open-source solutions.”
— Charbel Noujeim, Managing Director, Conemis
Flexilis, Inc.
“In today's world, open source software like MySQL and programs like Sun Startup Essentials make it possible for startups like Flexilis to compete with large corporations. Instead of focusing on how we can deploy an infrastructure to support our product, we can focus on other challenges, like delivering fantastic solutions to our customers.”
— John Hering, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Flexilis
Last.fm
6.cnLeading China Web 2.0 site uses Sun technology to build a powerful platform. 6.cn is a successful China Web 2.0 and video sharing Web site committed to becoming the leading new media site serving mainland China and the global Chinese community. 6.cn has 10 million visitors, 10 million independent IP addresses and 100 million page views every day. 6.cn ranks number one among all Chinese video Web sites and number three in a global context. 6.cn is one of the leading Chinese comprehensive Web sites.
“The Sun Fire X4500 (purchased through the Sun Startup Essentials discounted equipment program) combines server and storage technology, occupies a small space in the equipment room, and provides powerful performance and high throughput. It can be quickly deployed within a short time, satisfying our service requirements.”
— Li Yifeng, R&D Director, 6.cn
Practice-IT
“Like a lot of startups, we face the challenge of educating people about our technology. Through monthly events that are part of the Startup Essentials program, we have been introduced to Sun business mentors and other startups who act as a sounding board to help us promote the benefits of our service. The networking opportunities have also put us in touch with several potential new customers.”
— Ricky Doyle, Director and Co-founder, Practice-IT
EveryCity Ltd.
“We decided to go for Sun for a lot of reasons. We liked how well-thought-out everything is: looking at the Sun products, all of the features and functionality make sense.”
— Duncan Malcolm, Commercial Director, EveryCity Ltd.
ONEIS
“It looked like the Sun Startup Essentials program was designed with ONEIS in mind. Apart from the great discounts on Sun technology and the fact Solaris makes the software transition across platforms easy, we have a Sun account manager who gives us the confidence that whatever Sun equipment we order will be with us fast - a must for any new business.....Our core aim has always been to help small companies. If we can help our clients as much as Sun is helping us, we should be fine.”
— Ben Summers, Technical Director, ONEIS
Tkoon.com.cnAs a member of the Sun Startup Essentials program, Tkoon.com.cn deployed cost effective Sun servers and a hybrid data server as its storage platform to support its online networking platform built on MySQL Web 2.0.
“During the implementation phase, Sun provided excellent services in all aspects, including technical consulting and support. Tkoon.com.cn chose Sun because of the high availability, stability and security of the Sun servers. In addition, tkoon.com.cn favored Sun for its after-sale support.”
— Sun Jijun , CEO, Tkoon.com.cn
SendM
“SendM, the mobile many-to-many social networking company, has been part of the Sun Startup Essentials program since its launch in Israel in December 2007. SendM has benefited from Sun's startup program in testing, benchmarking and optimizing the reliability and scalability of their solution on Sun Solaris x86 and CMT servers preparing SendM for their target market. The Sun Startup Essentials program has supported our efforts in many ways in a quick, efficient and cost effective manner and is providing a service of immense value that all startups should take advantage of.”
— Ornit Shinar, Founder, SendM
Moodlerooms, Inc.
“By basing our datacenter infrastructure on Sun Fire T2000 servers and the Solaris 10 Operating System, we know we can guarantee uptime. We haven't taken service down once in a single year, and we need only one person to run the entire operation. The thing just runs itself, and we designed it that way from the ground up.”
— Stuart Sim, CTO and Chief Architect, Moodlerooms
fav.or.it
“We have had fantastic support from Sun through the Sun Startup Essentials program. We've been able to purchase equipment at massive discounts from the usual price. Along with this we get access to free software, free technical advice and hosting services from Sun partners with special promotions for Sun Startup Essentials program members. If you are a startup, this program is worth joining!”
— Nick Halstead, CEO & Founder, fav.or.it
Glasses Direct
“I find it to be a very compelling proposition when I see Sun and NTT Europe Online — two of the largest companies in the world — turn around and say to a company our size, 'You know what, we want to do business with you and we're going to help you...' I've always been able to phone an individual within either organization and ask a question or get feedback on something — and I've always been treated like the only customer. That's been a really refreshing experience for me.”
— Derek Colvin, Head of IT, Glasses Direct
Listen to PodcastMark Thacker, Solaris Product Marketing, Sun and Derek Colvin, Head of IT, Glasses Direct discuss how the Sun Startup Essentials program coupled with the migration from Linux to Solaris has provided the company with a stable, secure and powerful solution.
ZadspaceZadspace is a Sun startup partner with a new direct advertising system that prints full-color targeted promotions onto labels placed on the outside of shipped packages. Its proprietary algorithm analyzes data from an e-commerce or mail-order transaction to determine the geographic, psychographic, and demographic profile for a given consumer. That data is used to generate a personalized and relevant promotion for the recipient.
“The initiative Sun is taking with startups really helps companies develop and grow—not only from a technology standpoint but also from a marketing standpoint. It's been fantastic for us.”
— Todd Outten, President and Co-Founder of Zadspace
AppVoyage, Inc.
Learn More
“We envision network based services (virtual views, location based experience, security, single sign-on) for rapid deployment of mobile applications through our software. Sun architecture and hardware scales easily to meet large carrier and enterprise installations”
— Sagar Golla, Founder and CEO, AppVoyage
The Real Time Matrix
Learn More
“The Sun Fire T2000 server never goes down. While we have relatively few problems with Linux, it's nice to never have anything go wrong. I'd recommend that other startups try the Sun Fire T2000 server. Solaris is Unix, so if you know Linux, there is nothing to be afraid of.”
— Jeff Whitehead, CEO, The Real Time Matrix Corp.
Joyent, Inc.
“When you're starting up, it's tough to get access to the technology you need to deliver services on any type of scale—until now. Sun Startup Essentials was a great resource for us, enabling us to buy three Sun Fire x4500 systems for about the price of just one system, and providing resources to help us quickly build and deploy cost efficient solutions for our customers.”
— David Young, CEO, Joyent, Inc.
Postful, Inc.
“The Sun Startup Essentials program was my first direct contact with Sun. I have to say I've been deeply impressed. The advantages of Solaris over Linux became clear. Running on Solaris 10 Containers, the overall stability of our system is superior. Faster reboots through Solaris Containers have meant that major transitions which previously took hours can now be literally done in seconds.”
— Justin Garten, Founder, Postful, Inc.
FortiusOne
“As a startup, cost was important, but our application requires intense amounts of computation power. To be successful, we needed an infrastructure solution that was reliable and scalable. Through the Sun Startup Essentials program, Sun came through with an attractively priced platform along with free access to a suite of additional software and valuable services and storage that can handle our needs today and well into the future.”
— Chris Ingrassia, Chief Technology Officer, FortiusOne
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Based in Berlin, Germany, SoundCloud provides a web-based platform that is transforming the way music is shared, with over 250,000 customers that currently rely on its services. Realizing that its business depended on IT performance, SoundCloud evaluated its options and found an ideal solution with Sun Startup Essentials to migrate its Web server stack to a solution that includes virtual servers and a hybrid storage pool built with Sun technologies. Hosted and managed by London-based EveryCity (another Sun Startup Essentials customer), the new architecture quickly scales with growth, delivers the raw performance customers expect, and gives SoundCloud employees the ability to focus on expanding the business.
Social media company TweetMeme aggregates links posted on Twitter and calculates which ones are the most popular. These links are organized into categories and subcategories so that visitors to the TweetMeme site can easily find the stories that interest them most. Since TweetMeme was experiencing 85% month-on-month increase in unique visitors, growth is the critical word. The Sun Startup Essentials program has evolved to keep pace with the fast-moving social media industry and stepped in to support the startup. To ensure that it could scale to meet the needs of its global user base, the Sun team migrated TweetMeme to MySQL Enterprise, deployed on 10 Sun servers, a mixture of Sun Fire X4440 servers and Sun Fire X4150 Servers. TweetMeme is now analyzing, categorizing, and indexing more than 50,000 links per hour while handling 600 million retweets per month, and most importantly, the startup can continue to expand, using a proven database that will scale to meet any level of exponential growth in the future.
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Outspark is a growing entertainment services company that publishes and operates a number of online multiplayer social games. These free games and other related content are used by millions of players around the world every year. Outspark had to address the need for better performance and uptime for its Super Micro game servers. Anticipating a traffic spike after an upcoming launch of new games, the startup also needed new server technology that was more scalable than its previous infrastructure. Through the Sun Startup Essentials program, Outspark was able to purchase Sun Fire X2250 servers to host its online games, as well as several Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers and Sun Fire X4150 servers. Additionally, Sun Startup Essentials provided ongoing technical support and hosted Web services through Sun partner NaviSite.
France-based startup Planet-Work has specialized in the design of Internet technology solutions and has achieved a reputation for the high quality of its professional Web-hosting services. The company's technology strategy focuses on robust open-source software, which led it to deploy a hosting service based on the GNU/Linux Debian operating system along with Apache HTTP Server software, the MySQL Community Edition database, and the PHP development environment. Although the technology was reliable, the company found that adding capacity to the platform became increasingly expensive as customer demand rose. Frédéric Vannière, technology director at Planet-Work, and his team decided to participate in the Sun Startup Essentials program and utilize Sun's virtualized cloud-computing environment. Even though cloud computing is a relatively new concept in the world of Web hosting, Vannière was convinced that Sun would be able to deliver the energy savings and flexibility that would enable Planet-Work to outperform the competition.
MusicMetric helps companies in the music industry make faster, better-informed decisions by uncovering trends between musicians, releases, brands, and events. Distributed Web crawlers collect information about artists, releases, brands, and events, and needed multi-threaded servers to accelerate the simultaneous downloads. Data-mining algorithms employ machine learning (a form of intelligent, predictive analysis) to sift through terabytes of data and extract information that companies need to succeed, which required servers with sizable processors and memory. In short, MusicMetric needed an IT infrastructure that could support its innovative software and facilitate business growth as well as scalable storage architecture to support a rapidly expanding archive. Through the Sun Startup Essentials program, MusicMetric has reduced projected expenditures, maximized investments, met performance requirements, and provided for rapid scalability with its new solution.
Motionbox is an online personal video service that gives members a safe, friendly, private place to share your personal memories in vivid HD quality. They offer unlimited video storage, easy-to-use online editing tools, support for large file uploads, and an HD player and full-screen playback, high quality downloads to a computer or iPod or DVDs and Flipbooks of member videos. This type of unique service demands that Motionbox engineer a well tuned, highly responsive storage environment, and they built just that around the Sun Storage 7410.
Founded in 2006, San Francisco-based Scout Labs is a powerful, web-based application that finds signals in the noise of social media to help teams build better products and stronger customer relationships. Jochen Frey, CTO at Scout Labs speaks with Mark Thacker, Desktop Virtualization Marketing at Sun Microsystems, about its use of Sun Technologies including the benefits of the Sun Startup Essentials program, the Solaris Operating Systems, ZFS, Java and Sun Fire servers.
Founded in 2004, SearchForce is a Web software as service provider focused on maximizing ROI on search engine marketing (SEM). By offering to secure each client the best price per keyword to obtain a desired position on a designated search engine, and delivering real time data on cost-per-click metrics, SearchForce has developed a devoted customer base. Its innovative business model helps customers detect unanticipated surges or drops in online traffic, which in turn also creates a need for the company to commit to high-performance systems to help it lead in the burgeoning search engine marketing sector. Leveraging the Sun Startup Essentials program, SearchForce migrated from a Dell server running Linux environment to an integrated, energy-efficient and affordable Sun platform. As a result of the Sun Startup Essentials program, SearchForce was able to spec, purchase and deploy an integrated server and storage platform that could scale to meet its future needs, and also lowered its total cost of ownership on the hardware and software platform to run its business.
BlueOrange Networks offer "boutique" hosting in a fully virtualized environment. Because the virtual machines are independent of the physical hardware, they must live on a NAS array. Considering BlueOrange's tight budget and need to get clients up and running quickly, the startup decided to use the Open Storage 7110 based on great observability (in a shared environment it is critical to be
able to find out which customers are over-utilising the array), "enterprise" quality hardware backed up by Sun support, the ability to run high availability virtualisation, and of course, affordable price. "I was impressed with how quick and easy it was to get going. Just 5 minutes in a web browser, and we were up and running." - Daniel Shane, Infrastructure Manager
For independent musicians looking for fame and fortune, OurStage.com is the hottest place to be. This Web site gives up-and-coming artists a chance to have their work seen and heard while site users pick monthly contest winners in various genres. Cash, performance gigs, and mentor sessions are among the prizes winners receive. Founded in 2006, the Chelmsford, Massachusetts, company launched on steady footing with over $13 million in venture capital funding. The success of OurStage is due both to its popularity and innovative ranking system.
Based in San Francisco, The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit charitable organization that provides free, multilingual, online content through collaboratively edited Web sites called "wikis," among them its flagship project, Wikipedia. In November 2008, Wikimedia announced that it would partner with Sun Microsystems to help it build a secure and scalable open Web infrastructure. Through Sun's Startup Essentials program, Wikimedia acquired the Sun Fire X4150, Sun Fire X4240, and Sun Fire X4540 servers, running the Solaris 10 Operating System with the Solaris ZFS file system and MySQL. With the exceptional storage capacity of these unique storage servers, Wikimedia was able to raise the upload file size to 100 MB, opening the door to more multimedia content to enrich the experience of the users
Germany-based Conemis AG delivers software-as-a-service (SaaS) infrastructures, offering integrated technology and business solutions for distributed software architectures and developing markets. Though planning to use an open-source software platform from the start, Conemis found it hard to build confidence among clients for the original SaaS environment, which featured disparate hardware and software. Once Conemis learned about the Sun Startup Essentials program and its world-class products at "startup" prices, it decided to standardize its whole SaaS infrastructure on Sun technology. At the heart of the Conemis infrastructure, spread between two datacenters for full redundancy, are three kinds of Sun servers - all running the Solaris 10 Operating System and offering a combination of high performance and low power consumption.
Through their mobile security solutions designed specifically for mobile devices, the Los Angeles-based Flexilis protects mobile devices against threats including viruses, malware, spam, lost or stolen devices and hackers. Flexilis worked with Sun and the Sun Startup Essentials program to build a high-quality infrastructure at a much lower price than competitive solutions. The dual- and quad-core systems that run open source software give Flexilis the power, support, and confidence required to efficiently build a successful business.
Providing companies with an affordable on-demand platform to help employees learn, explore, and perform through the convenience of a Web browser, London-based Practice-IT has developed Practice-Labs, which give trainees dedicated access to their own environment where they can gain real-world, hands-on experience and skills. To drive future growth, Practice-IT replaced its Dell and HP infrastructure with a high-density computing platform powered by a Sun Fire X4150 server purchased through the Sun Startup Essentials program.
EveryCity Ltd. provides a range of managed hosting services including specific offerings to Web 2.0 startup companies and digital agencies. The London-based company positions itself as a specialist in delivering custom-made managed hosting solutions along with scalable high bandwidth solutions on managed dedicated servers. Sun Microsystems became an important part of EveryCity's strategy once the company began looking for an IT solutions provider that could support it over the long haul.
ONEIS offers hosted information management services to small data-rich consultancy companies. The London-based startup, owned and operated by Ben Summers and Jennifer Smith, will formally launch in Q4 2008.
Education institutions and Fortune 500 companies alike can use Moodlerooms to host course content built on Moodle software, an open source Web-based learning management system. With half a million hosted students and more than 500 customers worldwide, Moodlerooms is the largest service provider in the Moodle Partner Network. Based in Baltimore, Maryland, the rapidly growing company has 15 full-time employees and offices in several U.S. locations.
fav.or.it is the first integrated solution to allow blogging experts and non-technical people unlimited access to the worldwide blogosphere. Over the last few years blogging has grown exponentially, with various estimates of over 75 million blogs in existence today. But the problem lies with the tools that bloggers use. Most people have used news readers such as Google's service. This is still quite a "techie" product, however, as the user needs to understand how to add RSS stream feeds to the reader. But newsreaders still have an even greater major flaw, how do you read, comment and post to multiple blogs? This is the flaw that Fav.or.it comprehensively eliminates. No longer do you need to be a "techie" with multiple tabs open in a browser and understand RSS feeds. Fav.or.it brings ease of use and simplicity to the whole blogging experience. In short you can read blogs, post comments, write blogs and re-publish content all from the same platform.
Founded in 2004 by young entrepreneur Jamie Murray Wells, Glasses Direct has rapidly grown into the world's largest direct seller of custom-made prescription glasses. Seventy employees work from locations in London and Sweden and it is estimated the company sells a pair of glasses every three minutes. With annual revenue growth over 100 percent, Glasses Direct is making plans to expand operations to the United States.
AppVoyage pioneered mobile application technology to change the way mobile applications are delivered and used. The company provides on-demand access to mobile web applications. Founded in 2006, AppVoyage is headquartered in San Jose, California and operates branch offices in India.
The RealTime Matrix processes two million articles a day, brings all the data in to RSS II format, matches customer preferences, and makes this content available to users based on their preferences. The company processes up to 10 million requests for matching content on a daily basis.
To open the doors to a hosted storage business, Joyent chose the Sun Fire X4500 Server, a storage solution combined with massively powerful server capabilities-all in one box. The new Sun technology is designed to minimize space consumption while helping to make online storage affordable to clients.
Postful, Inc. is focused on providing a print and mail utility for the Web, and was founded in 2006 to enable people who use e-mail to correspond easily with people who don't use email. This web-based service increased their overall performance by 30%, and reduced hosting costs by 45% after moving from Linux OS to Solaris10 and Sun.
FortiusOne provides next-generation intelligent mapping services that make the world's geographic data accessible to everyone. GeoCommons is the company's public site for creating, exploring and sharing intelligent maps, and enables users to visualize data on maps for learning, decision making and problem solving.
