Needing to completely rebuild its Windows-based Web portal and ASP.NET-based applications to support a larger audience with new services, radio broadcaster RTL France began shopping around for a cost-effective, energy-efficient, and easy to manage IT environment that would be reliable and scalable. Open source solutions were its preference.

"We started from scratch," says Sebastien Thomas, network and system manager at RTL France, which owns some of the country’s most popular radio stations. "We didn't have any Java applications or application servers."

After considering Apache Tomcat and Ruby, the group decided on the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server with its enhanced clustering capabilities, which ensure high availability and scalability for deployment architectures through in-memory session-state replication. The clustering technology allows for the creation and management of clusters from a single administration console and manage a cluster as a single entity. "Because applications are deployed only once on the server," Thomas says, "it is much easier to administer several machines."

Another step in this upgrade was virtualizing the company's Windows servers, which was done with VMware ESX software running on Sun Fire X4600 servers. "We didn't need to evaluate other vendors' hardware," Thomas said. "We've known Sun hardware for a long time and trust it. ... Sun has everything we need, whether we're running Solaris OS applications, Linux applications, or Windows applications on VMware."

The new infrastructure includes a Sun Fire T1000 server to test applications prior to deployment and two Sun Fire T2000 servers to run the applications in the production environment. The servers are powered by UltraSPARC T1 processors with CoolThreads technology and run Solaris 10. Three other T1000 servers are used to share static files. Sun Fire X4100 and X4100 M2 servers with AMD Opteron processors are used for batch and other back-end processing, including generating full-text indexes, content aggregation, and log parsing. An Oracle 11g database completes the platform. Sun StorageTek QFS software is used for sharing static files - such as cascading style sheets, JavaScript, pictures, and movie and audio files - across hosts. The solution is backed by SunSpectrum Platinum Support.

"Having both UltraSPARC and X64 CPUs enables us to choose the right technology for the goal we want to achieve," Thomas reports. "We've found that the T1 processor is especially useful for dealing with lots of simultaneous requests, making it ideal for Web-site processing. AMD CPUs speed up our background processing."

Currently, RTL France is working on a new blog project. It is testing and will be upgrading to the latest version of Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server to take advantage of account management and single sign-on features in Sun OpenSSO Enterprise. This will enable users to access the company's services through Google, OpenID, or Facebook accounts. "Using SNMP Monitoring, Performance Advisor, and Performance Monitor in conjunction with a load tester, we'll be able to fine-tune GlassFish Enterprise Server to suite our needs and ensure that application loads are handled efficiently. No other application server makes these tasks so easy or gives us such a high level of confidence," said Thomas, concluding, "With Sun, we get stability, confidence, and savings in power, costs, and time."

More Information

French Radio Broadcaster Builds Fast, Energy-Efficient Web Portal on Sun GlassFish Platform

France's #1 Radio Station RTL Relies on GlassFish

Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server

Solaris 10 Operating System

Sun Fire T1000 Server

Sun Fire T2000 Server

Sun Fire X4100 M2 Server

Sun Fire X4600 M2 Server

Sun StorageTek QFS Software

SunSpectrum Platinum Support [...read more...]

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