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Music-Analysis Firm Saves 50% on Hardware Costs with Sun Startup Essentials Program Also Gains Efficiency, Speed, Networking Support
In 2008, MusicMetric of London was a newly formed company designed to assist companies in the music business make informed decisions by uncovering trends between musicians, releases, brands and events. Using a collection of custom database and software tools developed by the company founders, MusicMetric needed to accelerate simultaneous downloads conducted by web crawlers. Numerous technologies were evaluated including Sun and Dell hardware; PostgreSQL and MySQL database software; and Sun VirtualBox and Xen virtualization technologies. Sun hardware, software and its Startup Essentials program won the startup over. MusicMetric found that it could pay 50% less than it originally estimated for the cost of hardware via the Sun Startup Essentials program. The new infrastructure consisted of two Sun Fire T1000 servers - single- and dual-processor CMT machines with six and eight cores - running Solaris 10, web crawlers and three tiers of databases. A back-end database uses a custom application to hold data collected by web crawlers; a midtier database runs MySQL to store older data generated by data-mining applications; and a front-facing database runs MySQL to host recent data garnered by data-mining applications. Three Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers - each with two quad-core, 2.7 GHz, SMP processors and 64 GB of memory - run the Fedora Core OS as well as data-mining and data-analysis applications. One Sun Fire X2100 M2 server with the Fedora Core OS is set up as a file server to support development efforts. In addition, one Sun Storage J4200 array stores 6 TB of compressed archive data and makes use of the Solaris 10 OS and the built-in ZFS file system to provide for high availability. The cost savings for MusicMetric also has been evident in the energy-efficiency of the Sun solution. "The power usage of Dell servers was 60% higher than Sun's systems," said Greg Mead, head of research and development at MusicMetric. The reduced power consumption of its Sun servers equals to one-third the cost the company would have paid for hosting Dell servers. To help the company quickly switch between development environments running on the Solaris 10 OS, Linux and Windows, Sun VirtualBox was deployed on one Sun Ultra 24 workstation and existing PCs. This virtualization solution has helped extend MusicMetric's investments and boost productivity. "With Sun VirtualBox, we don't have to reboot to switch between virtual environments like you need to do with other solutions," notes Mead. "And it literally takes us a minute to install a new OS." Additionally, OpenOffice.org software was deployed on workstations to support day-to-day office tasks and data sharing. Networking is another benefit MusicMetric has reaped with the Sun Startup Essentials program. Speaking about the decision process in its selection of Sun, Mead explained, "...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." Since the installation, Mead commented, "We try to go to as many Sun events as we can. It's a really good way to meet other people dealing with similar challenges and Stewart Townsend, a Startup Essentials Manager, has introduced us to some great business leads." More Information
Customer Snapshot: MusicMetric
Sun Ultra 24 Workstation
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Through the Sun Startup Essentials program, we were able to buy about 50% more hardware than we expected given our budget. — Greg Mead, MusicMetric
Music-Analysis Firm Saves 50% on Hardware Costs with Sun Startup Essentials Program
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