Santa Clara, California - (The Hosting News) - January 7, 2008 - Technology firm and web hosting provider, Sun Microsystems, Inc., has reported that Web 2.0 companies continue to utilize the Sun Startup Essentials program for advanced server, software and storage technologies to run businesses.
Sean Gorman, CEO of FortiusOne remarked, ''We are at the forefront of the next-generation Web, where massive amounts of structured and unstructured data and powerful web computing technologies are converging. The technological breakthroughs implemented in our GeoCommons Web service platform required a very scalable and high-performance infrastructure. Sun met our needs with cost-effective solutions across our product lines.''
For startup innovators such as FortiusOne, Postful, Inc., and SearchForce, Sun's Startup Essentials program provides discounted access to the company's award-winning technologies including the Solaris Operating System (OS), Sun Fire x64 servers, Sun Fire SPARC servers with CoolThreads technology and Sun's storage products.
Since its inception in 2006, 1,200+ early-stage and Web 2.0 companies have applied to the Sun Startup Essentials program and approved startups are eligible to receive program member benefits that improve their time to market, maximize IT efficiencies and cut costs.
FortiusOne provides next-generation intelligent mapping solutions that make the exploding world of geographic data widely accessible via the Internet. The company's intelligent mapping Web services require huge amounts of computational power and storage capacity. To meet the needs of its growing business, FortiusOne had to strike a balance between costs and the need for a scalable and high-performance infrastructure. After reviewing alternative options, the company chose Sun's Startup Essentials program enabling them to purchase Sun's highly scalable server and storage technologies at discounted prices.
Taking web-based collaboration to a new level, Los-Angeles-based startup Postful, Inc. provides customers with an integrated print and mail utility service for the Web. The company offers small firms and mobile workers the resources of a large corporate mail room. It also provides a service where e-mails are sent via traditional mail benefiting the 65 million Americans who are not online. The company previously hosted its service on a virtual private server (VPS) and then migrated to its own Linux-based servers, but required more reliability. After conducting an extensive search for alternatives, Postful chose the Sun Startup Essentials program which provided access to free software and enterprise grade-IT products at low prices and discounted Web hosting. As a result of choosing the Solaris 10 OS and the Sun Fire x64 servers, Postful has noted a fifty percent reduction in the amount of developer time spent maintaining servers and a forty five percent reduction in hosting costs.
Justin Garten, Founder, Postful offered, ''The Sun Startup Essentials program was my first direct contact with Sun and I am deeply impressed. The switch to Sun has proved its worth many times. We can clearly see the advantages of Solaris over Linux. Additionally, the stability, tools and flexibility of Solaris are hugely valuable. As a result of using Sun, Postful has seen a thirty percent increase in performance and an eighty percent reduction in power and cooling costs. These are big savings that really impact the bottom line and our ability to offer customers a reliable and cost effective service.''
SearchForce, a Web services software provider, offers agencies and advertisers a single united interface for search engine marketing and portfolio management. Advertising agencies with a vested interest in the search engine performance of millions of keywords benefit significantly from SearchForce's highly scalable platform, targeted at maximizing return on investment on pay-per-click marketing initiatives. After comparing the Solaris 10 OS on the Sun Fire x64 servers with other vendor offerings, SearchForce found that Sun's technologies offered better throughput numbers and a seventy percent decrease in power consumption. Based on this information, SearchForce made the decision to move away from Dell servers powered by Red Hat Linux ES4 and leveraged Sun's Startup Essentials program to conduct a complete datacenter refresh. As a result of using Sun servers, the Solaris 10 OS and Sun StorageTek arrays, SearchForce has tripled throughput and enhanced its storage environment.
David Simon, Chairman, SearchForce added, ''By choosing Sun, we have cut costs and improved our performance, especially in the area of response time. Sun's Startup Essentials program was extremely helpful and enabled us to implement a full datacenter refresh in a cost effective and timely manner. We were particularly impressed to find that Sun Fire servers with CoolThreads technology can handle two to three times the load of our former machines while consuming about one quarter of the electricity used.''
Sun began offering web hosting services, based upon the Solaris 10 Operating System, and Sun systems and storage, through a partnership with Joyent and NaviSite. The offer is available for eligible U.S. based members of the Sun Startup Essentials program, designed to help early-stage companies get to market more quickly on Sun's enterprise- class technologies at a cost that fits their needs to conserve cash.
The hosting requirements of Web 2.0 and Internet Services startups typically differ from those of traditionally established companies, due to their increased need to grow and expand services with fluctuating customer demands. Sun is working closely with Joyent and NaviSite to help address these requirements and is now able to offer these emerging companies all the advantages of the extremely flexible and scalable Solaris 10 OS based infrastructure.
Joyent and NaviSite are using Solaris Container virtualization technology, part of the Solaris 10 OS, the most advanced OS on the planet, to deliver the secure and high-performance infrastructure to help deploy next-generation web applications that can scale based on demand. Sun's partners also provide value-add services to manage and monitor their hosted environments. With highly flexible hosting offerings, customers can choose to start with a small capacity and grow flexibly as their business and community grows.
The Sun Startup Essentials program is designed to help eligible U.S. based startup companies get to market faster while conserving cash. The program offers its members a range of discounted Sun products and services, including its award-winning Sun Fire x64 servers and Sun Fire servers with CoolThreads technology, and Sun's select StorageTek line of products, including modular disk arrays, NAS and tape storage products.
In addition to offering products and services to eligible U.S. based members, Sun also is offering free technical advice via email and access to free software such as Apache, MySQL and Perl (AMP) optimized to run on the Solaris 10 OS. As of today, program members can also select the Web hosting infrastructure from Sun partners based on Sun technologies along with services they need, in case they choose not to build and operate the infrastructure themselves. Sun develops technologies designed to power comprehensive markets, in more than 100 countries.
To learn more about Sun's web hosting program, please visit: www.sun.com/startupessentials.
For more information about Sun, please visit: http://sun.com.
