And here is SUNW selling some storedge,but not T3s...
Sun Storage and Servers Deliver Technology to Support Digital River's Global Commerce System
Innovative Commerce Service Provider Supports Thousands of Clients With 15 Terabytes of Sun-Supported High-Performance IT Infrastructure
PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW - news) announced today that Digital River, Inc. (Nasdaq: DRIV - news), the world's largest Commerce Service Provider (CSP) that builds, hosts and manages e-commerce sites for thousands of clients, has selected 15 terabytes of Sun StorEdge(TM) arrays and Sun Enterprise(TM) servers to provide exceptional performance for those clients.
``The Sun StorEdge arrays have a phenomenal amount of scalable storage capacity in an extremely small footprint,'' said Marty Boos, chief architect/vice president of information systems for Digital River. ``We can pack 1.5 terabytes of storage in a space about the size of a refrigerator, which is a fourth of the space previously required. The fiber optic connectivity completely eliminates cable length restrictions.''
``We are excited to provide Digital River with the technology that triples their I/O bandwidth,'' said Denise Shiffman, vice president of marketing, Sun Network Storage. ``Digital River can now add thousands of new clients without creating any I/O bottlenecks, which is vital in a market that depends on real-time access to information for its success.''
Digital River Pioneers Commerce Service Provider Marketplace for each of its thousands of clients, Digital River must not only customize the look and feel of both business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce front-ends, but also must store and retrieve the content for each of its clients by hosting and managing their complete e-commerce operations. By basing their infrastructure on 15 terabytes of Sun storage, which includes the Sun StorEdge A1000 and the Sun StorEdge D1000 disk arrays, Digital River is able to build, host and manage e-commerce systems for its clients with data-rich services and a complex business-to-business product catalog. These value-add services include e-marketing, fraud protection, customer service, physical and digital product fulfillment, integration with their backend systems and reverse logistics services.
Sun Targets Digital River's Unique e-Commerce Marketplace with High-performance Solutions Digital River builds its systems with an overhead factor to handle huge spikes in traffic at a short notice and purchases more servers when they get close to 50% of their capacity. Most companies build systems with the expectation of growing to 80 or 90% of capacity before purchasing new servers, overlooking the requirement for high availability during peak loads. For high performance, storage needs to be not only scalable, but also highly available.
Typically, a company builds a Web site by constructing several static HTML pages and when a change is required, modifies each necessary page. Digital River, however, has many clients, and the descriptions of the customers' products change continuously. Using separate static pages would be extremely unmanageable; therefore, Digital River has instead taken a data-driven approach by storing all of the content in its databases. The content is stored once and is thereby accessible to every client that sells a particular product.
One potential downfall to this approach is the slow page-generation time. Digital River solved this by applying multi-level caching internal to the Sun servers. When a page is requested, the page is cached locally. If an update has occurred, Digital River's system detects the update and flushes the cache so that a new, updated page is generated from scratch. Every subsequent request for this page is then very fast, because the page is already sitting in the cache. Evidence of this can be seen in average page latencies of less than one to two seconds across all clients.
``The entire Sun infrastructure is configured for high availability using clustering technology and load-balancing devices,'' said Boos. ``With the Sun systems, we are approaching 100 percent uptime. In fact, the downtime we have experienced has had nothing to do with failure of Sun hardware. The only exception to our 100 percent uptime was due to routine maintenance to bulletproof our infrastructure. I have a lot of experience in building high-availability systems for very large corporations. I know what works, and Sun works; we didn't even consider another vendor.''
About Digital River Inc.
Digital River is the world's largest Commerce Service Provider (CSP), providing over 8,000 companies with complete e-commerce solutions. The Company's e-commerce services include site development and hosting, order and transaction management, system integration, product fulfillment, e-marketing and customer service. Digital River's clients include Fujitsu, 3M, Nabisco, Polaris, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Autodesk, Adaptec, Block Financial, Staples.com and Fox Interactive. For more details about Digital River, visit the corporate web site at www.digitalriver.com or call 952-253-1234.
About Sun Network Storage
Sun Network Storage was formed by Sun Microsystems in July 1998 and is a recognized multi-billion dollar industry leader in the UNIX® and open systems storage market. Sun is changing the rules in network storage by delivering software and hardware written to an open network architecture. Sun's commitment to standards enables timely availability of new technology, investment protection for existing technology, and a thriving partner community. The comprehensive Sun StorEdge family of products enables customers to match storage to the application while providing scalable capacity and performance in a ``pay-as-you-grow'' architecture.
About the Sun Enterprise Server Family
The Sun Enterprise server family is the industry's only single, binary-compatible product line featuring a range of servers that scale from one to 64 processors -- providing customers with flexibility, investment protection and an unparalleled growth path. Designed for workgroup, departmental and data center computing environments, the Sun Enterprise server family provides an ideal platform for a variety of applications; including enterprise resource planning, electronic commerce, data warehousing, Internet/Intranet and customer management |
