This Sun Startup Essentials success story involves OneDoc, a private British company that provides collaboration and compliance software with technology based on the Microsoft software platform, making multi-user editing and sharing of Microsoft Word and other documents safe and effortless while also providing a brilliantly simple compliance solution. OneDoc's software tracks the changes to multiple Word documents by multiple users – and allows easy electronic collaboration for document review and editing.

When OneDoc required (in the words of David Grundy, Executive Chairman of OneDoc) "...high compute density, and networking connectivity in a single rack unit, hosted securely and with plenty of bandwidth to run complex server based applications and let our remote workers access it as if it were local to them. Multizone [OneDoc's partner firm] provided strategic and tactical support to make this happen seamlessly." Multizone introduced One Doc to the Sun Startup Essentials program.

When OneDoc 2.0 was released, Multizone seized the opportunity to seek the consolidation of OneDoc's technology infrastructure so that it could be centrally located on the Internet, providing everybody inside the company access to it as if it were local, and ensuring that the system could be staged for testing and quality assurance before trials at production level could begin.

Working with the Sun Startup Essentials program, OneDoc chose the Sun Fire X4150 server, powered by Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, because it provided the best price performance in a 1U form factor. The Sun Fire X4150 is a supported system for VMware, OneDoc's chosen host operating system. Multizone designed, built and tested a Microsoft virtual machine infrastructure consisting of domain controller, internal infrastructure servers including SQL Server and terminal server, two QA servers, two customer facing trial servers, and several QA desktop client images. This Windows Server-based infrastructure was chosen because OneDoc is developing software based upon end-to-end Microsoft technology from SharePoint through SQL Server to .NET and Microsoft Office.

According to Executive Chairman Grundy, "Everyone at OneDoc relies upon Sun x64 technology. Virtualization is the ideal solution to delivering the Microsoft-based infrastructure we required for development, QA and trial of a software product. Sun Startup Essentials made it possible for us to realize a tangible, credible environment for development and deployment - with complete confidence in its security."

With the Sun Fire X4150, OneDoc can manage DNS, IP addressing, Internet access and power. Multizone manages patching and system updates. The system has been live 24x7 since installation with only scheduled planned maintenance windows of downtime in the single digit minutes since then.

In summary, the bottom-line results in this Sun Startup Essentials story are:

• Effective product management process was introduced to ensure OneDoc was released to trial customers with a known set of functionality and capability
• Significant savings were made on server hardware retail pricing through the Sun Startup Essentials program
• Production use software for startups was sourced from Microsoft's software programs, saving tens of thousands of pounds compared with retail licenses.
• VMware was chosen for virtualization of the Microsoft environment and licensed for production use cost effectively because it was fully supported on the chosen Sun server hardware
• OneDoc’s trial system is professionally hosted and available 24 hours a day 7 days a week with resilient bandwidth and secure management.

More Information

Sun Startup Essentials

Sun Fire X4150 Server [...read more...]

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